Liu Mingze, Lin Peicheng, Huo Pengcheng, Qi Haocun, Jin Renchao, Zhang Hui, Ren Yongze, Song Maowen, Lu Yan-Qing, Xu Ting
National Laboratory of Solid-State Microstructures, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China.
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Optical Sensing and Manipulation, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China.
Nat Commun. 2025 Apr 29;16(1):3994. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-59234-y.
Perfect vector vortex beams (PVVBs) can precisely control the light's polarization and phase along tailored intensity profiles, offering significant potential for advanced applications such as optical trapping and optical encryption. Extending PVVBs from 2D to 3D configurations would provide an additional spatial control dimension and enhance their information capacity. However, a compact and low-loss solution to generating 3D PVVBs remains unresolved. Here, we propose and demonstrate the use of monolithic silicon carbide metasurfaces with polarization-dependent phase-only modulation to engineer arbitrary PVVBs in 3D space. We reconstruct the 3D intensity and polarization distributions of PVVBs along customized trajectories, showing their independence from polarization orders and spherical coordinates on the Poincaré sphere. Additionally, we demonstrate a monolithic metasurface that encodes parallel-channel 3D PVVBs for information encryption. The 3D PVVBs generated from minimalist metasurfaces hold great promise for multidimensional micromanipulation and laser micromachining, high-security information processing and high-dimensional quantum entanglement.
完美矢量涡旋光束（PVVBs）能够沿着定制的强度分布精确控制光的偏振和相位，在诸如光镊和光学加密等先进应用中具有巨大潜力。将PVVBs从二维配置扩展到三维配置将提供额外的空间控制维度并增强其信息容量。然而，生成三维PVVBs的紧凑且低损耗解决方案仍未得到解决。在此，我们提出并展示了使用具有仅依赖偏振的相位调制的单片碳化硅超表面来在三维空间中设计任意的PVVBs。我们沿着定制轨迹重建了PVVBs的三维强度和偏振分布，表明它们与庞加莱球上的偏振阶数和球坐标无关。此外，我们展示了一种用于信息加密的对平行通道三维PVVBs进行编码的单片超表面。由极简超表面生成的三维PVVBs在多维微操纵和激光微加工、高安全性信息处理以及高维量子纠缠方面极具前景。
