Fast electrical switching of orbital angular momentum modes using ultra-compact integrated vortex emitters

The ability to rapidly switch between orbital angular momentum modes of light has important implications for future classical and quantum systems. In general, orbital angular momentum beams are generated using free-space bulk optical components where the fastest reconfiguration of such systems is around a millisecond using spatial light modulators. In this work, an extremely compact optical vortex emitter is demonstrated with the ability to actively tune between different orbital angular momentum modes. The emitter is tuned using a single electrically contacted thermo-optical control, maintaining device simplicity and micron scale footprint. On–off keying and orbital angular momentum mode switching are achieved at rates of 10 μs and 20 μs respectively. Fast keying and mode switching exploiting the orbital angular momentum of light are sought after in optical communications and quantum key distribution for larger transmission capacity and higher security. Here Strain et al. , propose a compact thermo-optically tunable vortex emitter with microsecond switching rates.