Generation of High-Order Optical Vortex Knots and Links

Abstract

Optical vortex knots and links have gained significant attention due to their fascinating spatial configurations and topological stability. However, generating vortex knots and links with high-order topological invariants has been experimentally challenging in monochromatic light. In this Article, the high-order knotted light fields are solved from braided complex zeros and decomposed into the superposition of Laguerre-Gaussian modes. We propose a noniterative mode optimization scheme to robustly generate high-order vortex knots and links in light fields with sufficient contrast. We further verified the high-quality creation of vortex topologies through experimental visual analysis. These high-order vortex topologies can be further extended to complex vector textures and applied to existing optical information coding platforms and may find analogues in other physical fields.