Metasurface generates new states of light for fundamental research and applications.
There’s nothing new thing under the sun — except maybe light itself.
Over the last decade, applied physicists have developed nanostructured materials that can produce completely new states of light exhibiting strange behavior, such as bending in a spiral, corkscrewing and dividing like a fork.
These so-called structured beams not only can tell scientists a lot about the physics of light, they have wide range of applications from super resolution imaging to molecular manipulation and communications.
Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a tool to generate new, more complex states of light in a completely different way.
The research is published in Science.
“We have developed a metasurface which is a new tool to study novel aspects of light,” said Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper. “This optical component makes possible much more complex operations and allows researchers to not only explore new states of light but also new applications for structured light.”
The Harvard Office of Technology Development has protected the intellectual property relating to this project and is exploring commercialization opportunities.
The new metasurface connects two aspects of light, known as orbital angular momentum and circular polarization (or spin angular momentum). Polarization is direction along which light vibrates. In circularly polarized light, the vibration of light traces a circle. Think about orbital angular momentum and circular polarization like the motion of a planet. Circular polarization is the direction in which a planet rotates on its axis while orbital momentum describes how the planet orbits the sun.
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