Photopolymerization with light fields possessing orbital angular momentum: Generation of helical microfibers
Abstract
Photopolymerization is a powerful technique to create arbitrary micro-objects with a high spatial resolution. Importantly, to date all photopolymerization studies have been performed with incident light fields with planar wavefronts and have solely exploited the intensity profile of the incident beam. We investigate photopolymerization with light fields possessing orbital angular momentum, characterized by the topological charge . We show both experimentally and theoretically that, as a consequence of nonlinear self-focusing of the optical field, photopolymerization creates an annular-shaped vortex-soliton and an associated optical fiber, which breaks up into solitons or microfibers. These microfibers exhibit helical trajectories with a chirality determined by the sign of due to the orbital angular momentum of the light field and form a bundle of helical-microfibers. This research opens up a new application for light fields with orbital angular momentum, and our generated microfibers may have applications in optical communications and micromanipulation.
Citation
Lee , J , Arita , Y , Toyoshima , S , Miyamoto , K , Panagiotopoulos , P , Wright , E , Dholakia , K & Omatsu , T 2018 , ' Photopolymerization with light fields possessing orbital angular momentum: Generation of helical microfibers ' , ACS Photonics , vol. 5 , no. 10 , pp. 4156–4163 . https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.8b00959
Publication
ACS Photonics
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2330-4022Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2018 American Chemical Society. This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the author and source are cited.
Description
Funding: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant EP/P030017/1).Collections
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