Paraxial skyrmionic beams

Gao, Sijia; Speirits, Fiona C.; Castellucci, Francesco; Franke‐Arnold, Sonja; Barnett, Stephen M.; Götte, Jörg B.

doi:10.1103/physreva.102.053513

Cited by 101 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…The skyrmion is a topologically protected quasiparticle in condensed matter with a hedgehog-like vectorial field, that gradually changes orientation as one moves away from the skyrmion centre [21][22][23]. Recently skyrmion-like configuations have been reported in electromagnetism, including skyrmion modes in surface plasmon polaritons [17] and the spin field of focused beams [8,19]. Here we observe the skymrion field configurations in the magnetic field of propagating STLPs.…”

Section: Magnetic Vector Skyrmions Of Various Texturesmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…The complex electromagnetic strip and knots structures were also proposed as information carriers [14][15][16]. Recently observed electromagnetic skyrmions are relevant to topological skyrmions quasiparticles in high-energy physics and condensed matter [8,[17][18][19][20]. They have sophisticated vector topology [21][22][23], and enable applications in super-resolution microscopy [8], ultrafast imaging [24], and give rise to new types of spin-orbit optical forces [25].…”

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confidence: 99%

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Supertoroidal light pulses: Propagating electromagnetic skyrmions in free space

Shen

Hou

Papasimakis

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Topologically complex transient electromagnetic fields give access to nontrivial light-matter interactions and provide additional degrees of freedom for information transfer. An important example of such electromagnetic excitations are space-time non-separable single-cycle pulses of toroidal topology, the exact solutions of Maxwell described by Hellwarth and Nouchi in 1996 and recently observed experimentally. Here we introduce a new family of electromagnetic excitation, the supertoroidal electromagnetic pulses, in which the Hellwarth-Nouchi pulse is just the simplest member. The supertoroidal pulses exhibit skyrmionic structure of the electromagnetic fields, multiple singularities in the Poynting vector maps and fractal-like distributions of energy backflow. They are of interest for transient light-matter interactions, ultrafast optics, spectroscopy, and toroidal electrodynamics.

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Section: Magnetic Vector Skyrmions Of Various Texturesmentioning

confidence: 76%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Supertoroidal light pulses: Propagating electromagnetic skyrmions in free space

Shen

Hou

Papasimakis

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…The light field of Eq. ( 2), now a full Poincaré beam [56], contains a Néel type baby-Skyrmion whose optical polarization we have defined here in the linear êx,y basis, instead of the commonly used circular basis [48,52,54], because the linear basis is physically relevant when manipulating the atomic transition, as discussed in Sec. III A.…”

Section: Baby-skyrmionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2D baby-Skyrmions, like their 1D cousins [34], exhibit topologically non-trivial, non-singular configurations in reduced dimensions and have the best known early examples in superfluids as the Anderson-Toulouse-Chechetkin [35,36] and Mermin-Ho [37] non-singular vortices, owing to their ability to carry angular momentum. A large body of more recent research has included magnetic systems [38,39], with potential data storage applications, rotating atomic superfluids [40][41][42][43][44][45][46], exciton-polariton structures [47][48][49], and optical fields [50][51][52][53][54].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical excitations of Skyrmions, knotted solitons, and defects in atoms

Parmee,

Dennis,

Ruostekoski

2021

Preprint

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Analogies between non-trivial topologies of matter and light have inspired numerous studies, including defect formation in structured light and topological photonic band-structures. Threedimensional topological objects of localized particle-like nature attract broad interest across discipline boundaries from elementary particle physics and cosmology to condensed matter physics. Here we show how simple structured light beams can be transformed into optical excitations of atoms with considerably more complex topologies representing three-dimensional particle-like Skyrmions. This construction can also be described in terms of linked Hopf maps, analogous to knotted solitons of the Skyrme-Faddeev model. We identify the transverse polarization density current as the effective magnetic gauge potential for the Chern-Simons helicity term. While we prepare simpler two-dimensional baby-Skyrmions and singular defects using the traditional Stokes vectors on the Poincaré sphere for light, particle-like topologies can only be achieved in the full optical hypersphere description that no longer discards the variation of the total electromagnetic phase of vibration.

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“…[2][3][4][5] In addition, owing to the "intrinsic" spinorbit coupling governed by Maxwell's theory, many topology-like phenomena have been reported in real space, including polarization Möbius strips [6,7] and polarization vortices, [8,9] along with various chiral textures, such as optical domain walls, [10] photonic skyrmions, and merons. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Among these chiral textures, the magnetic skyrmion, [20][21][22] which was named after nuclear physicist Tony Skyrme, is a topologically nontrivial spin that forms via the spin-orbit interaction (Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction: DMI) in an electronic system that lacks inversion symmetry and minimizes the magnetic energy cost. The recently discovered photonic skyrmions, which have chiral spin textures and can be considered as the optical manifestation of magnetic skyrmions, have attracted widespread interest in the fields of spin optics, chiral quantum optics, and photoelectric interaction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symmetry‐Protected Photonic Chiral Spin Textures by Spin–Orbit Coupling

Shi

et al. 2021

Laser & Photonics Reviews

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Chiral spin textures are widely researched in condensed matter systems and have shown potential for use in spintronics and storage applications. Photonic counterparts of these textures are observed in various optical systems with broken inversion symmetry. Unfortunately, the resemblances are only phenomenological. This work proposes a theoretical framework based on the variational theorem to show that the photonic chiral spin textures in an optical interface originate from the system's symmetry and relativity. Analysis of the rotational symmetry in optical systems indicates that the conservation of the total angular momentum is preserved from the local variations of spin vectors. Specifically, although the integral spin momentum does not carry net energy, the local spin momentum distribution, which determines the local subluminal energy transport and minimization variation of the square of the total angular momentum, results in the chiral twisting of the local spin vectors. The findings of this study deepen the understanding of the symmetries, conservative laws, and energy transport in optical systems, reveal the similarities in the formation mechanisms and the geometries of photonic and condensed-matter chiral spin textures, and have potential applications in chiral and spin photonics.

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Paraxial skyrmionic beams

Cited by 101 publications

References 52 publications

Supertoroidal light pulses: Propagating electromagnetic skyrmions in free space

Supertoroidal light pulses: Propagating electromagnetic skyrmions in free space

Optical excitations of Skyrmions, knotted solitons, and defects in atoms

Symmetry‐Protected Photonic Chiral Spin Textures by Spin–Orbit Coupling

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