Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT Optical knots and links provide intrinsically 3D topological degrees of freedom for structured light, offering opportunities for topological holography, optical storage, and multidimensional information encoding. However, extending isolated optical knots and links to singularity‐based arrays remains challenging because closely spaced singularity trajectories can suffer from spatial crowding, coherent overlap, topological reconnection, and reconstruction ambiguity. Here we demonstrate that source coherence can serve as an active physical mechanism for the incoherent replication of optical topology. By engineering an optical coherence lattice at the source, a single topological unit can be replicated into spatially separated knots or links that behave as mutually incoherent array elements. This coherence‐mediated mechanism suppresses deterministic coherent coupling between neighboring units while preserving their individual 3D singularity connectivity. The number, spatial distribution, and spacing of the replicated elements can be flexibly programmed through the source coherence spectrum without redesigning the elementary topological field. As representative demonstrations, we experimentally realize and reconstruct trefoil‐knot and Hopf‐link arrays, confirming the generality of the method. Our results establish optical coherence as a programmable degree of freedom for scalable topological structured light, providing a compact route toward topological arrays and multidimensional optical information processing.
Source: Laser & Photonics Review
DOI: 10.1002/lpor.72003
Authors: Yaning Zhou, Ao Zhou, Dong Xu, Hongyu Sun, Xin Liu, Yangjian Cai, Chunhao Liang, Pujuan Ma
Institution: Shandong Normal University
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funders: National Natural Science Foundation of China, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, Taishan Scholar Project of Shandong Province, Key Technology Research and Development Program of Shandong, National Key Research and Development Program of China
Awards: G1364610287, G1444146699, G192624893, G2315218301, G2616001210, G2771507099, G3110708429, G3317748854, G367832729, G4080579200, G4453684972, G5309953408, G6504537105, G7323136766, G7390288863, G7516765268, G8083099940, G8474100721, G847629488, G8598449842, G8631377328, G8717927064, G9000848029, G9000848437, G9000848838, G973527117
OpenAlex ID: W7215817008