Generation of optical vortex beams via metasurfaces (Invited)

Optical vortex beams, carrying orbital angular momentum, possess tremendous advanced applications ranging from optical communication, micromanipulation and nonlinear optics to quantum information. Various methods have been proposed to generate optical vortices, such as spiral phase plate (SPP), mode converter and spatial light modulator (SLM). However, changing phase by accumulating propagation distance restrains the applications in integrated optics. Owing to the salient properties that metasurface is small-sized and easy to be integrated, it is expected to be an ideal optical vortices generator with excellent ability of regulating light field. The basic principles of generating vortex beams and recent progress in the use of metasurfaces were introduced in this article. First, methods of using dynamic phase, Pancharatnam-Berry (P-B) phase and hybrid phase to generate optical vortices were introduced. Subsequently, holography and encoding metasurfaces and multiplexing metasurfaces were reviewed to generate multiple vortices. Finally, based on the generation of optical vortices via metasurfaces, some potential applications and problems were briefly summarized and discussed.