Ground-state orbital angular momentum lasing from liquid crystal torons embedded in a microcavity.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 41824579.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aeb6167 and PMC identifier 12985666.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Orbital angular momentum laser beams have many important practical applications, such as optical tweezers or ultrafast communications. Creating such beams represents an important challenge in photonics. Here, we demonstrate that torons, which are topological defects in liquid crystal textures, when embedded in a microcavity, generate a real-space non-Abelian gauge field responsible for the topological inversion of ground and excited states. The resulting ground state produces robust lasing with nonzero orbital angular momentum in each of the circular polarization components.