Generating optical orbital angular momentum at visible wavelengths using a plasmonic metasurface
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Light beams with a helical phase-front possess orbital angular momentum along their direction of propagation in addition to the spin angular momentum that describes their polarisation. Until recently, it was thought that these two ‘rotational’ motions of light were largely independent and could not be coupled during light–matter interactions. However, it is now known that interactions with carefully designed complex media can result in spin-to-orbit coupling, where a change of the spin angular momentum will modify the orbital angular momentum and vice versa. In this work, we propose and demonstrate that the birefringence of plasmonic nanostructures can be wielded to transform circularly polarised light into light carrying orbital angular momentum. A device operating at visible wavelengths is designed from a space-variant array of subwavelength plasmonic nano-antennas. Experiment confirms that circularly polarised light transmitted through the device is imbued with orbital angular momentum of ±2ħ (with conversion efficiency of at least 1%). This technology paves the way towards ultrathin orbital angular momentum generators that could be integrated into applications for spectroscopy, nanoscale sensing and classical or quantum communications using integrated photonic devices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".