Structured beams and nano-manipulations

In 1974, Nye and Berry described the topological structure of the wave front as a screw-type dislocation in the wave trains, analogous to crystal defects, for the first time. In 1992, Allen and co-workers recognized that each photon of a vortex beam carries orbital angular momentum (OAM), ℓℏ, where ℓ describes the topological charge of the beam. Thus far, singularities in wave fields have been studied from fluid dynamics and plasma physics to optics and photonics, and even to electrons and neutron, etc. Meanwhile, the size of structured beam has been extended from bulk to nanoscale. The key property of a vortex beam is the existence of a quantized topological charge, which has found numerous applications in optical manipulation and trapping, optical communications, imaging, sensing, quantum science and astronomy, etc. This thematic series aims to explore the state-of-the-art advances of structured beams, both fundamental and applications.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Fundamental principles of structured beams, such as optical vortex beams and electron vortex beams.
• Generation and propagation of structured beams.
• Manipulation of optical and plasmonic vortex beams using metasurfaces.
• Structured beams for optical manipulation.
• Light-matter interaction
• Structured beams for imaging, sensing, microscopy, etc.

View articles published in the collection so far.

Lead Guest Editor
Yuanjie Yang, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Guest Editor
Carmelo Rosales-Guzmán, Centro de Investigaciones en Optica (CIO), Mexico
Mingzhou Chen, University of St. Andrews, UK

Submission Deadline: 31. March 2022

Before submitting your manuscript to any of these collections, please ensure you have carefully read the submission guidelines for Nanoscale Research Letters. The complete manuscript should be submitted through the Nanoscale Research Letters submission system. To ensure that you submit to the correct article collection please select the appropriate thematic series in the drop-down menu upon submission. In addition, indicate within your cover letter that you wish your manuscript to be considered as part of the relevant article collection. 

All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review and accepted articles will be published within the journal as a collection.

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