Orbital-to-spin angular momentum conversion employing local helicity

Abstract

Controlling the spatial degrees of freedom of light by its polarization is at the heart of countless phenomena and applications. The most prominent example is the generation of orbital angular momentum by circularly polarized light. Here, the authors demonstrate the opposite effect -- mastering spin by orbital angular momentum. They employ a nanoscopic scatterer to manipulate the input field locally at the nanoscale and generate purely circularly polarized light with the spin depending on the orbital angular momentum that they started with.