Novel Insights into Orbital Angular Momentum Beams: From Fundamentals, Devices to Applications

Dear Colleagues,

It is well-known now that angular momentum carried by elementary particles can be categorized as spin angular momentum (SAM) and orbital angular momentum (OAM). Since the early 1900s, Poynting recognized that a particle, such as a photon, can carry SAM, which has only two possible states, i.e., clockwise and anticlockwise circular polarization states. However, only fairly recently, in 1992, Allen et al. discovered that photons with helical phase fronts can carry OAM, which has infinite orthogonal states. In the past two decades, the OAM-carrying beam, due to its unique features, has gained increasing interest from many different research communities, including physics, chemistry and engineering. Its twisted phase front and intensity distribution have enabled a variety of applications, such as micromanipulation, laser beam machining, nonlinear matter interactions, imaging, sensing, quantum cryptography and classical communications.

This Special Issue aims to explore the novel insights of OAM beams. It will focus on state-of-the-art advances in fundamental theories, devices and applications, as well as future perspectives of OAM beams. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Fundamental principles and properties of structured light beams.
• Technology and device to generate, manipulate and detect OAM light beams.
• Micromanipulation using OAM beams, such as optical tweezers, optical trapping, particle acceleration.
• Spectroscopy, microscopy, imaging, sensing technology using vortex beams.
• Light-matter interaction by vortex beams, including laser machining and nonlinear interactions.
• OAM-based spatial mode encoding/multiplexing for quantum cryptography and classical communications.

Dr. Yang Yue
Dr. Hao Huang
Dr. Yongxiong Ren
Prof. Zhongqi Pan
Prof. Alan E. Willner
Guest Editors

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