Interaction of Structured Light With Nanostructured Matter

Although structured light has been extensively studied, its interaction with nanoscale matter has remained largely unexamined. Here, we demonstrate a symmetry-dependent interaction between structured light and nanostructured absorbers by investigating the orbital-angular-momentum-dependent extinction of gold nanodisk oligomers. Using a rigorous design framework, we fabricate diffractive optical elements via two-photon-polymerization grayscale lithography to generate three distinct flower-like beam modes. Scanning these beams across oligomers of different symmetries reveals that extinction is maximized when the beam and structure share the same rotational symmetry. A semi-analytical overlap model reproduces the observed trends with deviations consistently below 10 percentage points, confirming the robustness of the symmetry-based interaction mechanism.