Anatoly Zayats1
King's College London1
The ability to engineer and manipulate the properties of optical wavefronts, such as phase, polarisation and amplitude, is very important in numerous applications including imaging, metrology, optical communications as well as biomedical and quantum technologies Metamaterials and metasurfaces provide a rich playground for both passive and active manipulation of phase and polarisation of light. Engineering spin-orbital angular momentum conversion provides practical opportunities for designing complex vector beams. In this talk, we will discuss optical vector field topologies and their transformations enabled by strongly anisotropic metamaterials and metasurfaces. Field- and spin-skyrmion and meron topologies will be discussed. An anisotropic metamaterial platform for local control of polarisation in complex vector beams, including radial and azimuthal beams, will be presented. The results enable a flexible approach for tailoring complex vector beams and achieving required polarisation patterns on demand for harvesting functionalities and applications of complex light beams with complex polarisation and phase information in numerous photonic and quantum technologies, imaging and metrology.