International Collaboration Lights Rainbow Twisting

International collaboration of the Institute of Photonic Chips plays a critical role for the accomplishment of the mission of the Institute. In particular, researchers of the Institute have been engaged with a number of Singapore scientists in the area of optical vortices (Multidimensional phase singularities in nanophotonics, Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abj0039). One of the physical behaviors of an optical vortex is the twisting of the warfront of light, leading to the so called orbital angular momentum (OAM), which holds a key for high performance optical neural networks.
Researchers at Singapore University of Technology and Design; National University of Singapore; Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, A*STAR; Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR; and University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) have jointly published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology titled as “Coloured vortex beams with incoherent white light illumination”, reporting on the generation of colorful optical vortices by using the nanoprinting technology based on two-photon polymerization, a technology that the IPC holds its leading position.
Professor Gu said “the innovation of this collaborative work is that nanoprinted structures are illuminated with a white light beam. Thus the degree of the coherence carried by the white light beam adds a new physical dimensional to OAM states leaving from the nanostructures, resulting vortex rainbows. It can be expected that these vortex rainbows might increase the connectivity of an optical neural network, leading to high artificial intelligence”.