Optical vortex beams, possessing various unique physical properties, such as an annular intensity profile with a dark core, a helical wavefront, and an orbital angular momentum of ℓħ (where ħ is the reduced Planck constant) per photon, provide us many new fundamental light-matter interactions.
In recent years, we and our collaborators have discovered that optical vortex beams can twist melted or softened materials to complete various chiral structured materials, including chiral metal needles, chiral monocrystalline silicon microstructures, and chiral organic surface reliefs on a nano-/micro-scale, by orbital angular momentum transfer effects. We call this ‘optical vortex materials processing’.
This optical vortex materials processing should open potentially the door towards the development of chiral optical devices, for instance, chiral metasurfaces, sensitive detectors of the chiral chemical composites, and chiral chemical reactors at high time, cost and energy efficiencies.
In this presentation, we review the state-of-art of the chiral nano-/micro-structures fabrictaed by optical vortex materials processing. We further address wavelength-versatile optical vortex sources for the optical vortex materials processing.
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