Generation of optical vorticity from topological defects

Abstract

The propagation of an electromagnetic wave in a medium with a screw dislocation is studied. Adopting the formalism of differential forms, it is shown that torsion is responsible for quantized modes. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the modes thus obtained have well defined orbital angular momentum, opening the possibility to design liquid-crystal-based optical tweezers.

References in corpus (7)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Volterra Distortions, Spinning Strings, and Cosmic Defects
• Lensing effects in a nematic liquid crystal with topological defects
• Arbitrary Coherent Superpositions of Quantized Vortices in Bose-Einstein Condensates from Orbital Angular Momentum Beams of Light
• Helical Ribbons as Isometric Textures
• Entanglement of internal and external angular momenta of a single atom
• Search for Cosmic Strings in the COSMOS Survey

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Retrieving the saddle-splay elastic constant $K_{24}$ of nematic liquid crystals from an algebraic approach
• Geometric theory of topological defects: methodological developments and new trends
• Using torsion to manipulate spin currents