Phyllotaxis-inspired nanosieves with multiplexed orbital angular momentum
Zhongwei Jin, David Janoschka, Junhong Deng, Lin Ge, Pascal Dreher, Bettina Frank, Guangwei Hu, Jincheng Ni, Yuanjie Yang, Jing Li, Changyuan Yu, Dangyuan Lei, Guixin Li, Shumin Xiao, Shengtao Mei, Harald Gießen, Frank Meyer zu Heringdorf, Cheng‐Wei Qiu
Abstract
Abstract Nanophotonic platforms such as metasurfaces, achieving arbitrary phase profiles within ultrathin thickness, emerge as miniaturized, ultracompact and kaleidoscopic optical vortex generators. However, it is often required to segment or interleave independent sub-array metasurfaces to multiplex optical vortices in a single nano-device, which in turn affects the device’s compactness and channel capacity. Here, inspired by phyllotaxis patterns in pine cones and sunflowers, we theoretically prove and experimentally report that multiple optical vortices can be produced in a single compact phyllotaxis nanosieve, both in free space and on a chip, where one meta-atom may contribute to many vortices simultaneously. The time-resolved dynamics of on-chip interference wavefronts between multiple plasmonic vortices was revealed by ultrafast time-resolved photoemission electron microscopy. Our nature-inspired optical vortex generator would facilitate various vortex-related optical applications, including structured wavefront shaping, free-space and plasmonic vortices, and high-capacity information metaphotonics.