3D nanoprinted kinoform spiral zone plates on fiber facets for high-efficiency focused vortex beam generation.

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate an all-fiber high-efficiency focused vortex beam generator. The generator is fabricated by integrating a kinoform spiral zone plate (KSZP) on the top of the composite fiber structure using fs-laser two-photon polymerization 3D nanoprinting. The KSZP with spiral continuous-surface relief feature is designed by superimposing a spiral phase into a kinoform lens, which can efficiently concentrate and transform an all incident beam to a single-focus vortex beam, without the undesired zero-order diffracted light and extra high-order focus. Under arbitrary polarized light incident conditions, experiment results show that the focusing efficiency and vortex purity of the all-fiber generators are over 60% and 86%, respectively, which is much higher than that of a traditional binary SZP integrated on an optical fiber facet. In addition, characteristics of the generated vortex beam, such as focal spot, focal length and vortex topological charge are numerically designed and experimentally investigated. The experimental results agree well with the numerical simulation model using the FDTD algorithm. Due to the compact size, flexible design, polarization insensitivity, high focusing efficiency and high vortex purity, the proposed all-fiber photonic devices have promising potential in optical communication, particle manipulation and quantum computation applications.