Structured light offers a promising solution for the increasing data demands of modern optical networks, opening up new degrees of freedom that can be leveraged for greater channel capacity and more bits per photon. However, its implementation is hindered by real-world distortions, for example, atmospheric turbulence in free-space, with severe and rapidly evolving phase perturbations that alter the amplitude, phase and vectorial polarization structure of the beam. Here, we demonstrate that optical topologies in the form of skyrmions are highly resilient to the effects of real-world atmospheric turbulence. We create and transmit these particle-like topologies of light through a 270~m free-space optical link, revealing their robustness across a wide variety of conditions and turbulence strengths. While we observe severe distortion in the states' underlying degrees of freedom, we show that the topological numbers are preserved in all cases. We account for fast changes to the medium, where the channel produces statistically averaged outcomes, by probing the state's decoherence, showing that while the degree of polarisation consequently decays, the topology remains intact. Using topology, we show information can be transmitted through the channel with almost perfect fidelity (>98%) in most cases, only decreasing to 86% in the most severe conditions tested. Our work is the first to demonstrate the potential for optical topologies as reliable and robust information carriers in a real-world environment and points to the potential for other complex channels too, offering attractive features for classical and quantum communication alike.
Topological defects play a key role in a variety of physical systems, ranging from high-energy to solid state physics. They yield fascinating emergent phenomena and serve as a bridge between the microspic and macroscopic world. A skyrmion is a unique type of topological defect, showing great promise for applications in the fields of magnetic storage and spintronics. Here, we discover and observe optical skyrmion lattices that can be easily created and controlled, while illustrating their robustness to imperfections. Optical skyrmions are experimentally demonstrated by interfering surface plasm…
Spatially variant arbitrary polarization shaping for optical skyrmions generation
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Optoelectronics, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Jilin University（吉林大学电子科学与工程学院集成光电国家重点实验室）；Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学机械与自动化工程学系）；MIIT Key Laboratory of Complex-field Intelligent Exploration, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学光学与光子学院工信部复杂场智能探测重点实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai（北京理工大学珠海校区）
National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Optical Sensing and Manipulation, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University（南京大学工程与应用科学学院）；Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学物理与数学学院）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）
Quantum Skyrmions in Mixed States of Light and Their Nested Topology
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)（奥地利科学技术研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Analogies between non-trivial topologies of matter and light have inspired numerous studies, including defect formation in structured light and topological photonic band-structures. Three-dimensional topological objects of localized particle-like nature attract broad interest across discipline boundaries from elementary particle physics and cosmology to condensed matter physics. Here we show how simple structured light beams can be transformed into optical excitations of atoms with considerably more complex topologies representing three-dimensional particle-like Skyrmions. This construction ca…
State Key Laboratory of Extreme Photonics and Instrumentation, College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学光电科学与工程学院）；School of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand（威特沃特斯兰德大学物理学院）
