2D Exotic Optical Lattice via a Digital‐Coding Circular Airy Beam

Abstract

Optical lattices have been widely used from classical to quantum physics. The tunable and scalable fabrication of lattices would be of great significance in lattice‐based multipartite applications. This work demonstrates first that a circular Airy beam (CAB), which has the peculiar properties of self‐healing and abrupt autofocusing, can be used to generate two‐dimensional (2D) optical lattices in propagation when encoded by a programmable spatial mask, resulting in the formation of large‐scale and tunable optical lattices with both axis and axial symmetry, and even high‐orbital kaleidoscope shapes. The efficient diffraction of CAB during the spatial crosstalk with the mask enables the realization of tunable lattices with rich periodicity and complexity. The study shows a flexible method to manipulate lattices with large‐scale and versatile structures for potential applications in integrated and scalable optical and photonic devices.

Keywords

• 2D optical lattices
• circular Airy beam
• digital coding
• spatial crosstalk
• structured light