Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 10, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12401-4
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Funding
- Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship [N00014-19-1-2632]
- Brookhaven National Labs [354281]
- NSF GRFP program [DGE-1247312]
- National Science Foundation [ECCS-1610190]
- Office of Naval Research MURI program [N00014-13-10627]
- European Union Horizon 2020 program, within the European Research Council (ERC), PHOSPhOR [694683]
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Air Force Contract [FA8721-05-C-0002]
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Light carries both orbital angular momentum (OAM) and spin angular momentum (SAM), related to wavefront rotation and polarization, respectively. These are usually approximately independent quantities, but they become coupled by light's spin-orbit interaction (SOI) in certain exotic geometries and at the nanoscale. Here we reveal a manifestation of strong SOI in fibers engineered at the micro-scale and supporting the only known example of propagating light modes with non-integer mean OAM. This enables propagation of a record number (24) of states in a single optical fiber with low cross-talk (purity > 93%), even as tens-of-meters long fibers are bent, twisted or otherwise handled, as fibers are practically deployed. In addition to enabling the investigation of novel SOI effects, these light states represent the first ensemble with which mode count can be potentially arbitrarily scaled to satisfy the exponentially growing demands of high-performance data centers and super-computers, or telecommunications network nodes.
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