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Updated: Aug 14, 2025

The Generation of Higher-order Laguerre-Gauss Optical Beams for High-precision Interferometry
Published on: August 12, 2013
Large second-harmonic vortex beam generation with quasi-nonlinear spin-orbit interaction
Wenchao Zhao1, Kai Wang1, Xuanmiao Hong1
1Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
Abstract:
A harmonic vortex beam is a typical vector beam with a helical wavefront at harmonic frequencies (e.g., second and third harmonics). It provides an additional degree of freedom beyond spin- and orbital-angular momentum, which may greatly increase the capacity for communicating and encoding information. However, conventional harmonic vortex beam generators suffer from complex designs and a low nonlinear conversion efficiency. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate the generation of a large second-harmonic (SH) vortex beam with quasi-nonlinear spin-orbit interaction (SOI). High-quality SH vortex beams with large topological charges up to 28 are realized experimentally. This indicated that the quasi-angular-momentum of a plasmonic spiral phase plate at the excitation wavelength (topological charge, q) could be imprinted on the harmonic signals from the attached WS2 monolayer. The generated harmonic vortex beam has a topological charge of ln=2nq (n is the harmonic order). The results may open new avenues for generating harmonic optical vortices for optical communications and enables novel multi-functional hybrid metasurface devices to manipulate harmonic beams.
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