Revealing the invariance of vectorial structured light in perturbing media

Abstract

Optical aberrations have been studied for centuries, placing fundamental limits on the achievable resolution in focusing and imaging. In the context of structured light, the spatial pattern is distorted in amplitude and phase, often arising from optical imperfections, element misalignment, or even from dynamic processes due to propagation through perturbing media such as living tissue, free-space, underwater and optical fibre. Here we show that the polarisation inhomogeneity that defines vectorial structured light is immune to all such perturbations, provided they are unitary. By way of example, we study the robustness of vector vortex beams to tilted lenses and atmospheric turbulence, both highly asymmetric aberrations, demonstrating that the inhomogeneous nature of the polarisation remains unaltered from the near-field to far-field, even as the structure itself changes. The unitary nature of the channel allows us to undo this change through a simple lossless operation, tailoring light that appears robust in all its spatial structure regardless of the medium. Our insight highlights the overlooked role of measurement in describing classical vectorial light fields, in doing so resolving prior contradictory reports on the robustness of vector beams in complex media. This paves the way to the versatile application of vectorial structured light, even through non-ideal optical systems, crucial in applications such as imaging deep into tissue and optical communication across noisy channels.

References in corpus (5)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Supertoroidal light pulses: Propagating electromagnetic skyrmions in free space
• A Factorization Law for Entanglement Decay
• Photoelectronic mapping of spin-orbit interaction of intense light fields
• Quantum-optical Description of Phase Conjugation of Vector Vortex Beams in Stimulated Parametric Down Conversion

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Optical skyrmions and other topological quasiparticles of light
• Robust structured light in atmospheric turbulence
• Topologically controlled multiskyrmions in photonic gradient-index lenses
• Nondiffracting Supertoroidal Pulses: Optical "Kármán vortex streets"
• Theory of paraxial optical Skyrmions
• Spin angular momentum and optical chirality of Poincaré vector vortex beams
• Skyrmion Bag Robustness in Plasmonic Bilayer and Trilayer Moiré Superlattices
• Tailoring light to create invariant modal spectra through complex channels
• Transverse Polarization Gradient Entangling Gates for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computation
• A curvilinear framework for vector light fields