A review of multiple optical vortices generation: methods and applications

Abstract

Optical vortices carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have attracted increasing interest in recent years. Optical vortices have seen a variety of emerging applications in optical manipulation, optical trapping, optical tweezers, optical vortex knots, imaging, microscopy, sensing, metrology, quantum information processing, and optical communications. In various optical vortices enabled applications, the generation of multiple optical vortices is of great importance. In this review article, we focus on the methods of multiple optical vortices generation and its applications. We review the methods for generating multiple optical vortices in three cases, i.e., 1-to-N collinear OAM modes, 1-to-N OAM mode array and N-to-N collinear OAM modes. Diverse applications of multiple OAM modes in optical communications and non-communication areas are presented. Future trends, perspectives and opportunities are also discussed.

Keywords

optical communications / optical vortices / orbital angular momentum (OAM) / mode-division multiplexing (MDM) / mode multicasting

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant Nos. 11574001, 61761130082, 11774116 and 11274131), the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (No. 2014CB340004), the Royal Society-Newton Advanced Fellowship, the National Program for Support of Top-notch Young Professionals, the Yangtze River Excellent Young Scholars Program, the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province of China (No. 2018CFA048), and the Program for HUST Academic Frontier Youth Team (No. 2016QYTD05).

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