Photonics Insights
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Lei Zhou, Din Ping Tsai

Structured light refers to a series of special light beams with spatially variant amplitude, phase, and polarization distributions, or more general spatiotemporal profiles. A promising approach for shaping structured light is to utilize various miniaturized and integrated devices, including superposed fork gratings, microrings with angular gratings, 3D waveguides, trench waveguides, asymmetric directional couplers, metasurfaces, inverse design subwavelength structures, etc. Using these devices, a variety of structured light beams are flexibly manipulated (generation, processing, detection, application), such as vortex beams with a helical phase front carrying orbital angular momentum, high-order linearly polarized beams, Laguerre-Gaussian beams, Hermite-Gaussian beams, Bessel beams, Mathieu beams, Airy beams, knotted beams, in-plane waveguide modes, vector beams, etc. These demonstrations inspire the rapid and vigorous development of the cutting-edge research field of integrated structured light manipulation.

2024
Volume: 3 Issue 3
3 Article(s)
Chao Tian, Kang Shen, Wende Dong, Fei Gao, Kun Wang, Jiao Li, Songde Liu, Ting Feng, Chengbo Liu, Changhui Li, Meng Yang, Sheng Wang, and Jie Tian

Photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) is a rapidly developing biomedical imaging modality and has attracted substantial attention in recent years. Image reconstruction from photoacoustic projections plays a critical role in image formation in PACT. Here we review six major classes of image reconstruction approaches developed in the past three decades, including delay and sum, filtered back projection, series expansion, time reversal, iterative reconstruction, and deep-learning-based reconstruction. The principal ideas and implementations of the algorithms are summarized, and their reconstruction performances under different imaging scenarios are compared. Major challenges, future directions, and perspectives for the development of image reconstruction algorithms in PACT are also discussed. This review provides a self-contained reference guide for beginners and specialists in the photoacoustic community, to facilitate the development and application of novel photoacoustic image reconstruction algorithms.

Sep. 26, 2024
  • Vol. 3 Issue 3 R06 (2024)
  • Fei Ding, Chao Meng, and Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi

    Optical metasurfaces have emerged as a groundbreaking technology in photonics, offering unparalleled control over light–matter interactions at the subwavelength scale with ultrathin surface nanostructures and thereby giving birth to flat optics. While most reported optical metasurfaces are static, featuring well-defined optical responses determined by their compositions and configurations set during fabrication, dynamic optical metasurfaces with reconfigurable functionalities by applying thermal, electrical, or optical stimuli have become increasingly more in demand and moved to the forefront of research and development. Among various types of dynamically controlled metasurfaces, electrically tunable optical metasurfaces have shown great promise due to their fast response time, low power consumption, and compatibility with existing electronic control systems, offering unique possibilities for dynamic tunability of light–matter interactions via electrical modulation. Here we provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art design methodologies and technologies explored in this rapidly evolving field. Our work delves into the fundamental principles of electrical modulation, various materials and mechanisms enabling tunability, and representative applications for active light-field manipulation, including optical amplitude and phase modulators, tunable polarization optics and wavelength filters, and dynamic wave-shaping optics, including holograms and displays. The review terminates with our perspectives on the future development of electrically triggered optical metasurfaces.

    Sep. 27, 2024
  • Vol. 3 Issue 3 R07 (2024)
  • Jian Wang, Kang Li, and Zhiqiang Quan

    Structured light, also known as tailored light, shaped light, sculpted light, or custom light, refers to a series of special light beams with spatially variant amplitudes and phases, polarization distributions, or more general spatiotemporal profiles. In the past decades, structured light featuring distinct properties and unique spatial or spatiotemporal structures has grown into a significant research field and given rise to many developments from fundamentals to applications. Very recently, integrated structured light manipulation has become an important trend in the frontier of light field manipulation and attracted increasing interest as a highly promising technique for shaping structured light in an integrated, compact, and miniaturized manner. In this article, we give a comprehensive overview of recent advances in integrated structured light manipulation (generation, processing, detection, and application). After briefly introducing the basic concept and development history of structured light, we present representative works in four important aspects of integrated structured light manipulation, including multiple types of integrated structured light generation, many sorts of integrated structured light processing, diverse forms of integrated structured light detection, and various kinds of integrated structured light applications. We focus on summarizing the progress of integrated structured light manipulation from basic theories to cutting-edge technologies, to key devices, and to a wide variety of applications, from orbital angular momentum carrying light beams to more general structured light beams, from passive to active integration platforms, from micro-nano structures and metasurfaces to 2D photonic integrated circuits and 3D photonic chips, from in-plane to out-of-plane, from multiplexing to transformation, from linear to nonlinear, from classical to quantum, from optical communications to optical holography, imaging, microscopy, trapping, tweezers, metrology, etc. Finally, we also discuss in detail the future trends, opportunities, challenges, and solutions, and give a vision for integrated structured light manipulation.

    Sep. 17, 2024
  • Vol. 3 Issue 3 R05 (2024)
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