Orbital Angular Momentum Locking via Bound States in the Continuum

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Baù, Enrico, Heimig, Connor, Biechteler, Jonas, Rohrer, Lina, Hirler, Michael, Ren, Haoran, Maier, Stefan A., Antonov, Alexander A., Tittl, Andreas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Baù, Enrico
Heimig, Connor
Biechteler, Jonas
Rohrer, Lina
Hirler, Michael
Ren, Haoran
Maier, Stefan A.
Antonov, Alexander A.
Tittl, Andreas
author_facet Baù, Enrico
Heimig, Connor
Biechteler, Jonas
Rohrer, Lina
Hirler, Michael
Ren, Haoran
Maier, Stefan A.
Antonov, Alexander A.
Tittl, Andreas
contents Optical vortices are electromagnetic fields twisting around a phase singularity, resulting in quantized orbital angular momentum (OAM). When such vortices are formed by evanescent hybrid light-matter quasiparticles known as polaritons, they are referred to as polaritonic vortices (PVs). The nanometer-scale topologically robust features of such PVs promise to enable applications for lasing and thermal emission at deeply subwavelength scales. However, many conventional techniques are prone to producing multimode PVs due to poor mode selectivity, resulting in OAM mixing that degrades vortex purity and limits their performance for high-fidelity optical information encoding and multi-dimensional imaging. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a platform that generates deeply subwavelength PVs through quasi-bound states in the continuum (qBICs) in dielectric metasurfaces. In contrast to existing approaches, the qBIC intrinsically locks the PV to a single OAM and makes it robust against the polarization state of the excitation, including linear, elliptical and circular polarization. We experimentally realize qBIC-driven PVs through the interference of hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhPs) in hexagonal boron nitride by exploiting the highly uniform out-of-plane electric fields generated by the photonic qBIC, characterized via scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy. This results in HPhPs with a wavelength of around 30-40 smaller than the incident light, thereby enabling ultra-dense packing of multiple robust PVs with distinct OAM. Our platform brings PVs to the photonic chip scale, enabling applications in structured optical information transfer and communications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31154
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Orbital Angular Momentum Locking via Bound States in the Continuum
Baù, Enrico
Heimig, Connor
Biechteler, Jonas
Rohrer, Lina
Hirler, Michael
Ren, Haoran
Maier, Stefan A.
Antonov, Alexander A.
Tittl, Andreas
Optics
Optical vortices are electromagnetic fields twisting around a phase singularity, resulting in quantized orbital angular momentum (OAM). When such vortices are formed by evanescent hybrid light-matter quasiparticles known as polaritons, they are referred to as polaritonic vortices (PVs). The nanometer-scale topologically robust features of such PVs promise to enable applications for lasing and thermal emission at deeply subwavelength scales. However, many conventional techniques are prone to producing multimode PVs due to poor mode selectivity, resulting in OAM mixing that degrades vortex purity and limits their performance for high-fidelity optical information encoding and multi-dimensional imaging. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a platform that generates deeply subwavelength PVs through quasi-bound states in the continuum (qBICs) in dielectric metasurfaces. In contrast to existing approaches, the qBIC intrinsically locks the PV to a single OAM and makes it robust against the polarization state of the excitation, including linear, elliptical and circular polarization. We experimentally realize qBIC-driven PVs through the interference of hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhPs) in hexagonal boron nitride by exploiting the highly uniform out-of-plane electric fields generated by the photonic qBIC, characterized via scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy. This results in HPhPs with a wavelength of around 30-40 smaller than the incident light, thereby enabling ultra-dense packing of multiple robust PVs with distinct OAM. Our platform brings PVs to the photonic chip scale, enabling applications in structured optical information transfer and communications.
title Orbital Angular Momentum Locking via Bound States in the Continuum
topic Optics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31154