Advances and Applications of Orbital Angular Momentum

Dear Colleagues,

Almost 30 years have passed since the seminal paper of Allen and coworkers ignited a still flourishing research field, paving the way for scientific milestones and disruptive applications of structured light in an amazing variety of areas, including life science, soft and condensed matter, and information and communication technology. In particular, orbital angular momentum beams offered a new degree of freedom to encode information or increase the Hilbert space in quantum applications, while their peculiar intensity and phase distributions enabled innovative and advanced techniques in microscopy, imaging, and light–matter interaction. More recently, orbital angular momentum has transcended the field of optics, embracing other frameworks sharing the wavelike picture such as acoustic and matter waves, e.g., electron beams.

For those reasons, we have determined that a collection of recent works and reviews on this broad topic would be very timely and could contribute to the growing profile of this area of research. The topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, applications of optical angular momentum in high-resolution microscopy, particle tweezing and manipulation, astronomical coronagraphy, laser material processing, spatial division multiplexing, holography, and quantum information and imaging. The Issue will also cover all the techniques and methods that can be used to control and manipulate the angular momentum of an electromagnetic field: diffractive optics, metasurfaces, metamaterials, plasmonics, photonics, etc. Furthermore, applications of orbital angular momentum to matter waves, such as electron and particle beams, are also considered and highly encouraged.

This Special Issue aims to collect the works of the large community working in those fields, demonstrating the prominent role played by twisted wavefields in today’s technology and the still vivid and inspiring action of orbital angular momentum 30 years later.

Best regards

Dr. Gianluca Ruffato
Dr. Carmelo Rosales Guzmán
Guest Editors

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• orbital angular momentum
• optical vortices
• vector beams
• particle tweezing and manipulation
• high-resolution microscopy
• classical and quantum imaging
• spatial division multiplexing
• quantum information
• optical fibres
• metasurfaces
• electron beams
• holography
• nonlinear optics
• light-matter interaction
• twisted wavefields
• transformation optics