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High-purity orbital angular momentum states from a visible metasurface laser

Nature Photonics volume 14, pages 498–503 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 30 April 2021

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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Fig. 1: Metasurface design and characterization.
Fig. 2: Metasurface laser and modes.
Fig. 3: Extreme SO lasing.
Fig. 4: Ultrapure OAM lasing modes.

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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.

Code availability

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).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Adam Vallés

    Present address: Molecular Chirality Research Center, Chiba University, Inage-ku, Chiba, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

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

    Hend Sroor, Bereneice Sephton, Darryl Naidoo, Adam Vallés & Andrew Forbes

  2. Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yao-Wei Huang, Vincent Ginis & Federico Capasso

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Yao-Wei Huang & Cheng-Wei Qiu

  4. CSIR National Laser Centre, Pretoria, South Africa

    Darryl Naidoo

  5. Applied Physics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Vincent Ginis

  6. Center for Nanoscale Systems, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Antonio Ambrosio

  7. CNST – Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Via Giovanni Pascoli, Milan, Italy

    Antonio Ambrosio

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Contributions

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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Correspondence to Andrew Forbes.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information with 16 figures, 1 table and 15 references.

Supplementary Video 1

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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