Abstract

The spatial variation of vector vortex beams with arbitrary polarization states and orbital angular momentum (OAM) values along the beam propagation is demonstrated by using plasmonic metasurfaces with the initial geometric phase profiles determined from the caustic theory. The vector vortex beam is produced by the superposition of deflected right- and left-handed circularly polarized component vortices with different helical phase charges, which are simultaneously generated off-axially by the single metasurface. Besides, the detailed evolution processes of intensity profile, polarization distribution and OAM value along the beam propagation distance is analyzed. The demonstrated arbitrary space-variant vector vortex beam will pave the way to many promising applications related to spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion, spin-orbit hybrid entanglement, particle manipulation and transportation, and optical communication.

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Research Center/Lab(s)

Intelligent Systems Center

Second Research Center/Lab

Center for Research in Energy and Environment (CREE)

Comments

The authors acknowledge support from the Office of Naval Research under Grant No. N00014-16-1-2408, and the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECCS-1653032 and DMR-1552871.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2045-2322

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2019 The Author(s), All rights reserved.

Creative Commons Licensing

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publication Date

01 Dec 2019

PubMed ID

31292498

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