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Revealing the invariance of vectorial structured light in complex media

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 538–546 (2022)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 25 July 2022

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Abstract

Optical aberrations place fundamental limits on the achievable resolution with focusing and imaging. In the context of structured light, optical imperfections and misalignments and perturbing media such as turbulent air, underwater and optical fibre distort the amplitude and phase of the light’s spatial pattern. Here we show that polarization inhomogeneity that defines vectorial structured light is immune to all such perturbations, provided they are unitary. As an example, we study the robustness of vector vortex beams propagating through highly aberrated systems, demonstrating that the inhomogeneous nature of polarization remains unaltered even as the medium itself changes. The unitary nature of the channel allows us to undo this change through a simple lossless operation. This approach paves the way to the versatile application of vectorial structured light, even through non-ideal optical systems, crucial in applications such as imaging and optical communication across noisy channels.

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Fig. 1: Vectorial light through a tilted lens.
Fig. 2: Impact of scattering across multiple subspaces.
Fig. 3: Unitary channel mapping and its inversion.
Fig. 4: Choice of measurement basis.
Fig. 5: Unravelling turbulence.
Fig. 6: Real-world channels.

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Data availability

The code used to reproduce the results is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6502858.

Code availability

The code used to reproduce the results is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6502858.

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Acknowledgements

A.F. thanks the NRF-CSIR Rental Pool Programme.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Isaac Nape, Keshaan Singh.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand, Wits, South Africa

    Isaac Nape, Keshaan Singh, Asher Klug, Wagner Buono, Ané Kritzinger, Angela Dudley & Andrew Forbes

  2. Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, León, Mexico

    Carmelo Rosales-Guzman

  3. Wang Da-Heng Collaborative Innovation Center for Quantum Manipulation and Control, Harbin University of Science and Technology, Harbin, China

    Carmelo Rosales-Guzman

  4. School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland

    Amy McWilliam & Sonja Franke-Arnold

  5. Department of Chemistry, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Ané Kritzinger & Patricia Forbes

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Contributions

I.N., W.B., A. Klug, A.M., K.S., C.R.-G. and A. Kritzinger performed the experiments. All the authors contributed to the data analysis and writing of the manuscript. A.F. supervised the project.

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Correspondence to Andrew Forbes.

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Supplementary Tables 1–5, Figs. 1–11 and Sections I–XII.

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Nape, I., Singh, K., Klug, A. et al. Revealing the invariance of vectorial structured light in complex media. Nat. Photon. 16, 538–546 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01023-w

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