Tunable beam splitting via photorefractive nonlinearity and its applications in chiral waveguide induction and vortex generation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates tunable beam splitting in photorefractive nonlinear materials, enabling applications like chiral waveguide creation and vortex generation through controlled self-splitting of nondiffractive beams.

Contribution

It introduces a novel phase-pre-modulation method to control beam splitting in photorefractive media and explores its applications in waveguide and vortex generation.

Findings

Nondiffractive beams exhibit self-splitting controlled by phase modulation.

Controlled splitting enables creation of chiral waveguides.

Method allows generation of even-order optical vortices.

Abstract

We report experimental observation and theoretical explanation of novel propagation regimes for optical beams in an artificial nonlinear material with outstanding photorefractive properties. Nondiffractive beams, which keep their shapes invariant in the free space, feature self-splitting from the middle in two separating secondary beams, due to the light-matter interaction. The splitting degree is controlled by means of a phase-pre-modulation method. We propose applications of the self-splitting to the creation of an effectively chiral waveguide and the generation of even-order vortices.