Phyllotaxis-inspired nanosieves with multiplexed orbital angular momentum

By Zhongwei Jin, D. Janoschka, Junhong Deng, L. Ge, P. Dreher, B. Frank, Guangwei Hu, Jincheng Ni, Yuanjie Yang, Jing Li and 8 more. eLight, 2021

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nanophotonic platforms such as metasurfaces, achieving arbitrary phase profiles within ultrathin thickness, emerge as miniaturized, ultracompact and kaleidoscopic optical vortex generators. However, it is often required to segment or interleave independent sub-array metasurfaces to multiplex optical vortices in a single nano-device, which in turn affects the device’s compactness and channel capacity. Here, inspired by phyllotaxis patterns in pine cones and sunflowers, we theoretically prove and experimentally report that multiple optical vortices can be produced in a single compact phyllotaxis nanosieve, both in free space and on a chip, where one meta-atom may contribute to many vortices simultaneously. The time-resolved dynamics of on-chip interference wavefronts between multiple plasmonic vortices was revealed by ultrafast time-resolved photoemission electron microscopy. Our nature-inspired optical vortex generator would facilitate various vortex-related optical applications, including structured wavefront shaping, free-space and plasmonic vortices, and high-capacity information metaphotonics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1bf97bb8e5957e78cf21ba3d17fd3dd64bcda882