Highly localized continuous wave optical vortex with controllable orbital angular momentum orientation and topological charge.

We report an approach to simultaneously control orbital angular momentum (OAM) orientation and topological charge in highly localized optical vortices by employing a 4π focusing system. The required continuous wave illumination field in the pupil planes is derived by superimposing the radiation pattern of only one dipole placed at the focal point of the high numerical aperture lens and the corresponding tailored spiral phase factor. The topological charge and OAM orientation of the obtained focused fields are quantitatively evaluated based on the focal field distributions calculated by the Richards-Wolf vector diffraction integration theory. Results show that the OAM of the generated optical vortices can be tailored by changing the oscillation orientation of the mimic dipole and the topological charge of the superimposed spiral phase term. The presented method may find potential applications in optical trapping, optical tweezers, light-matter interaction, etc.

Dynamic manipulation of graphene plasmonic skyrmions.

With the characteristics of ultrasmall, ultrafast, and topological protection, optical skyrmions are great prospects for applications in high intensity data stroage, high resolution microscopic imaging, and polarization sensing. Flexible control over the topology of optical skyrmions is required for practical implementation/application. At present, the manipulation of optical skyrmions usually relies upon the change of spatial structure, which results in a limited-tuning range and a discontinuous control in the parameter space. Here, we propose continuous manipulation of the graphene plasmon skyrmions based on the electrotunable properties of graphene. By changing the Fermi energy of one pair of the standing waves or the phase of incident light, one can achieve topological state transformation of graphene plasmon skyrmions, which is evident by the change of skyrmion number from 1 to 0.5. The direct manipulation of the graphene plasmon skyrmions is demonstrated by simulation results based on the finite element method. Our work suggests a feasible way to flexibly control the topology of an optical skyrmionic field, which can be used for novel integrated photonic devices in the future.

Molecular scale behavior of xylan during solvent-controlled extraction and precipitation.

Solvent-controlled extraction and precipitation are the most fundamental methods for obtaining hemicellulose from lignocellulosic biomass and purification processes. However, the dissolution and precipitation mechanisms involved have scarcely been mentioned. In this study, the molecular scale behavior of xylan-type hemicellulose during solvent-controlled extraction and precipitation is investigated using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. To bring the model closer to the real extracted xylan, a high degree of polymerization (DP100) of xylan is established, and hemicelluloses with low DP (DP15 and DP50) are also investigated. Four phenomena are explained at the molecular level, including the influence of the polymerization degree and side chain on the solubility of xylan in water, the improvement of the xylan's solubility in NaOH, the precipitation of xylan in ethanol, and the acetyl group preservation of xylan in DMSO. This study contributes to an increased understanding of the dissolution and precipitation mechanisms of hemicellulose and provides a resource for the simulation of high DP hemicellulose, which gives a theoretical basis for the efficient extraction of high-purity hemicellulose as well as economic biorefining.

Strong coupling of multiple optical interface modes with ultra-narrow linewidth in one-dimensional topological photonic heterostructures.

Coherent coupling of optical modes with a high Q-factor underpins realization of efficient light-matter interaction with multi-channels in resonant nanostructures. Here we theoretically studied the strong longitudinal coupling of three topological photonic states (TPSs) in a one-dimensional topological photonic crystal heterostructure embedded with a graphene monolayer in the visible frequencies. It is found that the three TPSs can strongly interplay with one another in the longitudinal direction, enabling a large Rabi splitting (∼ 48 meV) in spectral response. The triple-band perfect absorption and selective longitudinal field confinement have been demonstrated, where the linewidth of hybrid modes can reach 0.2 nm with Q-factor up to 2.6 × 103. Mode hybridization of dual- and triple-TPSs were investigated by calculation of the field profiles and Hopfield coefficients of the hybrid modes. Moreover, simulation results further show that resonant frequencies of the three hybrid TPSs can be actively controlled by simply changing the incident angle or structural parameters, which are nearly polarization independent in this strong coupling system. With the multichannel, narrow-band light trapping and selectively strong field localization in this simple multilayer regime, one can envision new possibilities for developing the practical topological photonic devices for on-chip optical detection, sensing, filtering, and light-emitting.

Polarization-selective narrow band dual-toroidal-dipole resonances in a symmetry-broken dielectric tetramer metamaterial.

Here we propose a metasurface consisting of symmetry-broken dielectric tetramer arrays, which can generate polarization-selective dual-band toroidal dipole resonances (TDR) with ultra-narrow linewidth in the near-infrared region. We found, by breaking the C4v symmetry of the tetramer arrays, two narrow-band TDRs can be created with the linewidth reaching ∼ 1.5 nm. Multipolar decomposition of scattering power and electromagnetic field distribution calculations confirm the nature of TDRs. A 100% modulation depth in light absorption and selective field confinement has been demonstrated theoretically by simply changing the polarization orientation of the exciting light. Intriguingly, it is also found that absorption responses of TDRs on polarization angle follow the equation of Malus' law in this metasurface. Furthermore, the dual-band toroidal resonances are proposed to sense the birefringence of an anisotropic medium. Such polarization-tunable dual toroidal dipole resonances with ultra-narrow bandwidth offered by this structure may find potential applications in optical switching, storage, polarization detection, and light emitting devices.

Generalized spiral transformation for high-resolution sorting of vortex modes.

We achieve high-resolution sorting of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light with two bespoke diffractive optical elements using the generalized spiral transformation. The experimental sorting finesse is 5.3, approximately two times better performance than what has been reported. These optical elements will be useful for optical communication based on OAM beams and can be easily extended to other fields that use conformal mapping.

Enhanced Diffractive Circular Dichroism from Stereoscopic Plasmonic Molecule Array.

Artificial nanostructures with large optical chiral responses have been intensively investigated recently. In this work, we propose a diffractive circular dichroism enhancement technique using stereoscopic plasmonic molecule structures. According to the multipole expansion analysis, the z-component of the electric dipole becomes the dominant chiral scattering mechanism during the interaction between an individual plasmonic molecule and the plane wave at a grazing angle. For a periodical structure with the designed plasmonic molecule, large diffractive circular dichroism can be obtained, which can be associated with the Wood-Rayleigh anomaly. Such a diffractive circular dichroism enhancement is verified by the good agreement between numerical simulations and experimental results. The proposed approach can be potentially used to develop enhanced spectroscopy techniques to measure chiral information, which is very important for fundamental physical and chemical research and bio-sensing applications.

A fractionation strategy of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin from wheat straw via the biphasic pretreatment for biomass valorization.

Developing an environmentally friendly and efficient pretreatment to utilize wheat straw is essential to a sustainable future. An acid biphasic system with 2-methyltetrahydrofuran (2-MeTHF) organic solvent and dilute p-toluenesulfonic acid (p-TsOH) were employed for the simultaneous fractionation of three components. Results showed that the biphasic system had excellent cellulose protection and high removal of hemicellulose and lignin. In detail, Under the optimal conditions (0.1 M p-TsOH, 2-MeTHF: H2O = 1:1 (v:v), 140 °C, 3 h), mostly cellulose retained in the residues (95.69%), 57.18% of lignin was removed and high yield of hemicellulose-based C5 sugars was achieved (77.49%). In the further process of dehydration of pre-hydrolysate dichloromethane (DCM) as an organic phase, the yield of furfural was 80.07% (170 °C-80 min). The saccharification of residue reached 95.82%. p-TsOH/2-MeTHF/H2O pretreatment was desirable for high selectivity fractionation. Important chemicals for bioenergy including furfural, monosaccharides and lignin are obtained.

Metastability of photonic spin meron lattices in the presence of perturbed spin-orbit coupling.

Photonic skyrmions and merons are topological quasiparticles characterized by nontrivial electromagnetic textures, which have received increasing research attention recently, providing novel degree of freedom to manipulate light-matter interactions and exhibiting excellent potential in deep-subwavelength imaging and nanometrology. Here, the topological stability of photonic spin meron lattices, which indicates the invariance of skyrmion number and robustness of spin texture under a continuous deformation of the field configuration, is demonstrated by inducing a perturbation to break the C4 symmetry in the presence spin-orbit coupling in an optical field. We revealed that amplitude perturbation would result in an amplitude-dependent shift of spin center, while phase perturbation leads to the deformation of domain walls, manifesting the metastability of photonic meron. Such spin topology is verified through the interference of plasmonic vortices with a broken rotational symmetry. The results provide new insights on optical topological quasiparticles, which may pave the way towards applications in topological photonics, optical information storage and transfer.

Quantitative detection of high-order Poincaré sphere beams and their polarization evolution.

The high-order Poincaré sphere (PS) introduces a mapping whereby any vector beams with spatially homogeneous ellipticity are represented by a specific point on the surface of the sphere. We propose the quantitative detection of high-order PS beams by introducing three sets of nonuniform polarization bases in the high-order Stokes parameters. Overall polarization detection is realized by directly separating and measuring the respective intensity of different nonuniform polarization bases based on S-plate. The polarization evolution of the PS beams on the high-order PS and between the conventional and the high-order PS are achieved by S-plate. The results provide new insights for the generation, evolution and detection of arbitrary beams on the high-order PS.

Towards optical toroidal wavepackets through tight focusing of the cylindrical vector two dimensional spatiotemporal optical vortex.

Spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOVs) carrying transverse orbital angular momentum (OAM) are of rapidly growing interest for the field of optics due to the new degree of freedom that can be exploited. In this paper, we propose cylindrical vector two dimensional STOVs (2D-STOVs) containing two orthogonal transverse OAMs in both x-t and y-t planes for the first time, and investigate the tightly focusing of such fields using the Richards-Wolf vectorial diffraction theory. Highly confined spatiotemporal wavepackets with polarization structure akin to toroidal topology is generated, whose spatiotemporal intensity distributions resemble the shape of Yo-Yo balls. Tightly focused radially polarized 2D-STOVs will produce wavepackets towards transverse magnetic toroidal topology, while the focused azimuthally polarized 2D-STOVs will give rise to wavepackets towards transverse electric toroidal topology. The presented method may pave a way to experimentally generate the optical toroidal wavepackets in a controllable way, with potential applications in electron acceleration, nanophotonics, energy, transient light-matter interaction, spectroscopy, quantum information processing, etc.

Self-starting high-order mode oscillation fiber laser.

In this paper, we proposed and demonstrated two kinds of all few-mode fiber lasers with self-starting high-order mode (HOM) oscillation. The fundamental mode can be completely suppressed by using a bandpass filter with a few-mode fiber pigtail. In the continuous-wave (CW) regime, the fiber laser directly oscillates in HOM with a signal-to-noise ratio as high as 70 dB, and the slope efficiency is up to 46%. The self-starting HOM mode-locked pulse can be easily achieved by employing a saturable absorber. The HOM oscillation pulsed fiber laser stably operates at 1063.72 nm with 3dB of 0.05 nm, which can deliver cylindrical vector beams with a high mode purity of over 98%. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration for self-starting HOM direct oscillation in stable CW and pulsed operation states without additional adjustment. This compact and stable HOM fiber laser with a simple structure can have important applications in materials processing, optical trapping, and spatiotemporal nonlinear optics. Moreover, this work may offer a promising approach to realizing high-power fiber laser with arbitrary HOMs stable output.

Non-spreading Bessel spatiotemporal optical vortices.

Non-spreading nature of Bessel spatiotemporal wavepackets is theoretically and experimentally investigated and orders of magnitude improvement in the spatiotemporal spreading has been demonstrated. The spatiotemporal confinement provided by the Bessel spatiotemporal wavepacket is further exploited to transport transverse orbital angular momentum through embedding spatiotemporal optical vortex into the Bessel spatiotemporal wavepacket, constructing a new type of wavepacket: Bessel spatiotemporal optical vortex. Both numerical and experimental results demonstrate that spatiotemporal vortex structure can be well maintained and confined through much longer propagation. High order spatiotemporal optical vortices can also be better confined in the spatiotemporal domain and prevented from further breaking up, overcoming a potential major obstacle for future applications of spatiotemporal vortex.

Nanoscale chiral imaging under complex optical field excitation with controllable oriented chiral dipole moment.

Since chirality is a fundamental building block of nature, the identification of the chiral specimen's structure is of great interest, especially in applications involving the modification and utilization of proteins. In this work, by exploiting photoinduced force exerted on an achiral tip placed in the vicinity of a reciprocal chiral sample, a novel technique is proposed to detect the sample's chirality in nanoscale spatial resolution. Under separate excitation of focal field carrying chiral dipole moment with opposite handedness, there is a differential optical force ΔF exerted on the tip apex, which is connected to the enantiomer type and quasi-linearly depends on specific component of the sample's chirality parameter. With the help of time-reversal approach, we prove that the required excitation can be derived by radiation fields from the superposition of parallel electric and magnetic dipoles. Through adjusting the orientation of the chiral dipole moment, all the diagonal components of the sample's chirality can be exclusively retrieved. In addition, the sensitivity of the proposed technique is demonstrated to enantiospecify nanoscale chiral samples with chirality parameter on the order of 0.001. The proposed technique may open new avenue for wide applications in biomedicine, material science and pharmaceutics.

High-power cylindrical vector beam fiber laser based on an all-polarization-maintaining structure.

We propose and demonstrate an all-polarization-maintaining (PM) high-power cylindrical vector beam (CVB) fiber laser based on the principle of mode superposition. The non-degenerated LPy 11a is generated from the oscillator with the maximum power of 11.9W, whose slope efficiency is 24.4%. Then the stable single TE01 vector beam is achieved by the superposition of LPy 11a and LPx 11b in an all-PM architecture, its output power is 3.1W and mode purity of 91.2%. Due to the all-PM architecture, our configuration is free of adjusting polarization controller (PC) and reliable during long-term operation. This laser could be used as a high-power CVBs source for a wide range of applications towards scientific research and industrial field.

Ultra-narrow-band circular dichroism by surface lattice resonances in an asymmetric dimer-on-mirror metasurface.

Narrow-linewidth circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is a promising candidate to push the limits of molecular handedness detection toward a monolayer or even to a single molecule level. Here, we designed a hybrid metasurface consisting of a periodic array of symmetry-breaking dielectric dimers on a gold substrate, which can generate strong CD of 0.44 with an extremely-narrow linewidth of 0.40 nm in the near-infrared. We found that two surface lattice resonance modes can be excited in the designed metasurface, which can be superimposed in the crossing spectral region, enabling a remarkable differential absorption with a high Q-factor for circular polarizations. The multipole decomposition of the resonance modes shows that the magnetic dipole component contributes most to the CD. Our simulation results also show that the CD response of the chiral structure can be engineered by modulating the structural parameters to reach the optimal CD performance. Ultra-narrow-linewidth CD response offered by the proposed metasurface with dissymmetry provides new possibilities towards design of the high-sensitive polarization detecting, chiral sensing and efficient chiral light emitting devices.

High-resolution optical orbital angular momentum sorter based on Archimedean spiral mapping.

We propose a generalized spiral transformation scheme that is versatile to incorporate various types of spirals such as the Archimedean spiral and the Fermat spiral. Taking advantage of the equidistant feature, we choose the Archimedean spiral mapping and demonstrate its application in high-resolution optical orbital angular momentum (OAM) mode sorting. Experimental results show 90% efficiency and cross-talk of -8.78 dB that is sufficient to separate adjacent OAM modes. This generalized transformation scheme may also find various applications in optical transformation and can be easily extended to other fields related to conformal mapping.

Generation of cylindrical vector beams in a linear cavity mode-locked fiber laser based on nonlinear multimode interference.

In this paper, a linear cavity mode-locked pulsed fiber laser generating cylindrical vector beams (CVBs) is proposed and demonstrated based on a nonlinear multimode interference. A homemade long-period fiber grating with a broad bandwidth of 121 nm is used as a mode converter inside the cavity. The saturable absorber was formed by single-mode fiber-graded index multimode fiber-single mode fiber (SMF-GIMF-SMF) structure. By controlling the pump power, the operation states are switchable among continuous-wave, Q-switched mode-locked (QML), and mode-locked regimes. The repetition rate of the QML CVB pulse envelope varies from 57.4 kHz to 102.7 kHz at the pump range of 118 to 285 mW. When increasing pump power to 380 mW, mode-locked CVB pulse repetition rate of 3.592 MHz, and pulse duration of 4.62 ns are achieved. In addition, the maximum single-pulse envelope energy can reach 510 nJ, and 142 mW average-power CVBs with a slope efficiency of as high as 20.2% can be obtained. Moreover, azimuthally and radially polarized beams can be obtained with mode purity over 95% in different operating regimes. The proposed fiber laser has a simple structure, and the operation is controllable in both temporal and spatial domains, which presents a flexible pulsed CVB source for application of laser processing, time or mode division multiplexing system, and spatiotemporal nonlinear optics.

Numerical modeling for the characteristics study of a focusing ultrashort spatiotemporal optical vortex.

Spatiotemporal (ST) wave packet carrying pure transverse orbital angular moment (OAM) with subwavelength spatial size has attracted increasing attentions in recent years, which can be obtained by tightly focusing a linear superposition of ST vortices with different topological charges. In this work, numerical models are proposed to explore the impact of the pulse width of the ST vortex on the characteristics of its focal field. We demonstrate that the rigorous model for calculating the focused ST wave packet is essential for ultrashort optical pulse, while the simplified model has the advantage of high efficiency but can only provide credible results when the pulse width of the illumination is long enough. Specifically, when the pulse width decreases from 100 fs to 5 fs, the accuracy of the simplified model would decrease significantly from 99% to 65.5%. In addition, it is found that the pulse duration would still lead to the collapse of transverse OAM structure near the focus of a high numerical aperture lens, even though the ST astigmatism has already been corrected. To analyze the physical mechanism behind this distortion, Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is adopted to retrieve the OAM distribution of the focal field. It is shown that the contributions from undesired OAM modes would become nontrivial for short pulse width, leading to the formation of the focal field with hybrid OAM structures. These findings provide insight for the focusing and propagation studies of ultrashort ST wave packets, which could have wide potential applications in microscopy, optical trapping, laser machining, nonlinear light-matter interactions, etc.

Optical vortex fields with an arbitrary orbital angular momentum orientation.

Optical vortex fields with a tilted phase singularity line are associated with a tilted orbital angular momentum (OAM). In this Letter, we propose a method to generate optical vortex fields with arbitrary OAM orientation based on the time-reversal method, vectorial diffraction theory, and a 4Pi optical configuration. The ability to control the 3D OAM orientation may find applications in optical tweezing, light-matter interaction, and spin-orbital coupling.