Hyperspectral management of the photon orbital angular momentum – HYPERPHORB

The project HYPERPHORB aims at developing a toolbox that allows tailoring the photon orbital angular momentum over broad spectral range with enhanced photonic functionalities. To date, the hyperspectral management of orbital angular momentum of light is not accessible to state-of-the-art optical devices. We propose to develop arrays of microscopic orbital angular momentum states controllers, each of them being tuned to operate at a predetermined wavelength thereby realizing spectral sharing of the orbital angular momentum processing of a broadband input light field. This represents a nontrivial scientific and technological challenge that we aim at addressing by exploiting the transfer of topology from the matter to the light through the optical spin-orbit interaction process. This implies to realize high-resolution spatial patterning of the material optical anisotropy endowed with well-defined topological features. To this aim we will consider both cases of natural and artificial material birefringence. The first one relies on electrically induced liquid crystal topological defects used as self-engineered microscopic optical vortex generators. The second option relies on the form-birefringence exhibited by optically isotropic media endowed by subwavelength features, which will be done by tailored-made nanostructuring of solid-state optical materials. The main advantage of the first option comes from the electrically tunable birefringence of liquid crystals whereas the second option is expected to give an easier access to arbitrary orbital angular momentum subspaces. By doing so, this project will foster the emergence of novel singular photonics technologies such as hyperspectral information encoding on high-dimensional photon states, wavelength multiplexing of the orbital angular momentum, and topological shaping of ultra-short optical pulses.