Optical analog computing enabled broadband structured light

Abstract

Mathematically, any function can be expressed as the operation form of another function. Here, the idea is introduced into an optical system to generate structured light. In the optical system, a mathematical function is represented by an optical field distribution, and any structured light field can be generated by performing different optical analog computations for any input optical field. In particular, optical analog computing has a good broadband performance, as it can be achieved based on the Pancharatnam–Berry phase. Therefore, our scheme can provide a flexible way to generate broadband structured light, and this is theoretically and experimentally demonstrated. It is envisioned that our work may inspire potential applications in high-resolution microscopy and quantum computation.