Nanophotonic Materials for Twisted‐Light Manipulation

Abstract

Twisted light, an unbounded set of helical spatial modes carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM), offers not only fundamental new insights into structured light–matter interactions, but also a new degree of freedom to boost optical and quantum information capacity. However, current OAM experiments still rely on bulky, expensive, and slow‐response diffractive or refractive optical elements, hindering today's OAM systems to be largely deployed. In the last decade, nanophotonics has transformed the photonic design and unveiled a diverse range of compact and multifunctional nanophotonic devices harnessing the generation and detection of OAM modes. Recent metasurface devices developed for OAM generation in both real and momentum space, presenting design principle and exemplary devices, are summarized. Moreover, recent development of whispering‐gallery‐mode‐based passive and tunable microcavities, capable of extracting degenerate OAM modes for on‐chip vortex emission and lasing, is summarized. In addition, the design principle of different plasmonic devices and photodetectors recently developed for on‐chip OAM detection is discussed. Current challenges faced by the nanophotonic field for twisted‐light manipulation and future advances to meet these challenges are further discussed. It is believed that twisted‐light manipulation in nanophotonics will continue to make significant impact on future development of ultracompact, ultrahigh‐capacity, and ultrahigh‐speed OAM systems‐on‐a‐chip.

Planar Optical Cavities Hybridized with Low‐Dimensional Light‐Emitting Materials

“…Furthermore, it has been of great interest to shape and engineer quantum sources, that is, structured light. [309] For instance, Chen et al reported epitaxial-QD based on-chip sources that generates single photons with arbitrary orbital angular momentum. [76] The epitaxial-QD is coupled with microring resonators of which the inner walls are patterned to make angular grating components.…”

Advances in Metaphotonics Empowered Single Photon Emission

“…[95,96] In recent years, on-chip nanophotonics based on various metasurfaces has provided the route for manipulating OAM in real space, momentum space, and the spatiotemporal domain, while dispensing with bulky and expensive traditional optical components. [95,96] In this context, introducing QE-coupled metasurfaces can open a new avenue for on-chip realization of OAM-encoded single-photon emission.…”

Stable Single‐Mode Lasing from a Hybrid Perovskite–Polymer Fiber

“…Ting Wang, Weiqing Chen, Hok-Leung Loi, Wei Gao, Xuhui Xu,* Longhui Zeng, Ping Kwong Cheng, Safayet Ahmed, Xue Yu, Feng Zhao, Jianbei Qiu, Feng Yan, Siu Fung Yu,* and Yuen Hong Tsang* DOI: 10.1002/adom.202200439 of different functional nanowires that perform the generation, transmission, manipulation, and detection of light on a common platform. [1][2][3] Extensive investigations on the physical and structural properties of nanomaterials have boosted the rapid development of nanowire-based photonic devices for various applications. [4,5] At present, there are two main methods for integrating nanowires with on-chip optical waveguides: direct growth of semiconductor nanowires on the passive waveguide material or mechanical transfer of nanowires from their growth substrate to the target devices.…”