On‐Chip Detection of Orbital Angular Momentum Beam by Plasmonic Nanogratings

Thanks to the unlimited orthogonal states, the orbital angular momentum (OAM) light is widely accepted as a promising carrier for high information multiplexing in optical communications, in which the OAM detection is an important issue. To keep up with the ever‐growing demand for compact integration, here, a plasmonic grating is employed to spatially couple the OAM modes into two separated propagating surface plasmon polariton (SPP) beams with different splitting angles. These splitting angles are found to strongly rely on the topological charges of the incident beams and are insensitive to the specific location of the OAM beam illumination, which provides an intuitive detection of the OAM modes without particular alignment. Besides, a further unidirectional SPP launching from the OAM beam is also achieved by a particular composite grating. With such composite grating, both the topological charge value and sign of OAM beam in a single measurement can be detected. Our results provide a convenient method for alignment‐free OAM detection by a compact device, and would inspire more multiplexing applications in nanophotonics. The illuminating orbital angular momentum (OAM) beam is converted into two split propagating surface plasmon polariton waves, where the separation degree can be used to characterize the topological charge of the incident OAM beam.