Making vortices of light | Nature Photonics

Access through your institution Buy or subscribe Optical beams with radial or azimuthal polarization are of interest for applications such as particle acceleration and imaging beyond the

diffraction limit, but generating such beams is not a trivial matter. Martynas Beresna and co-workers from Southampton University and the Lithuanian firm Altechna have now fabricated a

monolithic glass polarization converter that promises to greatly simplify this task (_Appl. Phys. Lett._ in the press; 2011). The team's optical vortex converter is capable of

transforming the polarization of an input beam from circular to either radial or azimuthal, depending on whether the input beam is left- or right-handed. They tested their prediction by

focusing a train of intense pulses from an amplified femtosecond Yb:KGW laser system (pulse length of 270 fs, wavelength of 1,030 nm and optimal repetition rate of 200 kHz) onto a 2-mm-thick

fused silica sample mounted on a computer-controlled translation stage. They moved the sample in 1 µm steps during exposure to produce the required spiral pattern. The resulting design of

nanostructures provided a retardance as large as 260 nm, which is sufficient for performing the required polarization conversion at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The researchers say

it takes around 1.5 hours to produce a 1.2-mm-diameter converter. They characterized the converters using a quantitative birefringence measurement system; the images above show the spiral

pattern of the glass nanostructures (left) and the resulting spatial variation in retardance (right). This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution ACCESS OPTIONS

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institutional subscriptions * Read our FAQs * Contact customer support Authors * Oliver Graydon View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar RIGHTS

AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Graydon, O. Making vortices of light. _Nature Photon_ 5, 331 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.119

Download citation * Published: 31 May 2011 * Issue Date: June 2011 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.119 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Anyone you share the following link with will be able to

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