Abstract
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) from lasers holds promise for compact, at-source solutions for applications ranging from imaging to communications. However, conjugate symmetry between circular spin and opposite helicity OAM states (±ℓ) from conventional spin–orbit approaches has meant that complete control of light’s angular momentum from lasers has remained elusive. Here, we report a metasurface-enhanced laser that overcomes this limitation. We demonstrate new high-purity OAM states with quantum numbers reaching ℓ = 100 and non-symmetric vector vortex beams that lase simultaneously on independent OAM states as much as Δℓ = 90 apart, an extreme violation of previous symmetric spin–orbit lasing devices. Our laser conveniently outputs in the visible, producing new OAM states of light as well as all previously reported OAM modes from lasers, offering a compact and power-scalable source that harnesses intracavity structured matter for the creation of arbitrary chiral states of structured light.
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Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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The codes that support the plots and multimedia files within this paper are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
A.V. acknowledges support from the Claude Leon Foundation. This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the NSF under award no. 1541959. CNS is a part of Harvard University. F.C. is supported by funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant nos. MURI: FA9550-14-1-0389, FA9550-16-1-0156), and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) (award no. OSR-2016-CRG5-2995). Y.-W.H. and C.-W.Q. are supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister's Office, Singapore under its Competitive Research Program (CRP award no. NRF-CRP15-2015-03).
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H.S., D.N., B.S. and A.V. performed experiments with custom optics designed and fabricated by Y.-W.H. and A.A. All authors contributed to data analysis and writing of the manuscript. A.F., F.C. and C.-W.Q. supervised the project.
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A numerical simulation of the laser cavity.
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Sroor, H., Huang, YW., Sephton, B. et al. High-purity orbital angular momentum states from a visible metasurface laser. Nat. Photonics 14, 498–503 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-0623-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-0623-z
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