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Conventionally, intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) is associated with phase vortices. However, our investigation into the propagation dynamics of 2D superimposed catastrophe beams, termed cyclone catastrophe beams (CCBs), reveals that these beams inherently exhibit rotation and possess OAM, distinct from the typical connection to phase vortices. Our observations clearly show these beams rotating during autofocusing propagation and particle manipulation, confirming the presence of OAM. Theoretical calculations affirm that the OAM of these beams is intrinsic and can be adjusted by varying the number of superimposed beams. Furthermore, our interference and phase studies indicate that, although CCBs exhibit phase vortices, they do not rotate around the singularities of phase vortices and their total topological charges are zero. This implies that the manifestation of OAM within CCBs does not rely on nonzero topological charge of the presented phase vortices within CCBs. Especially, eigenstates decomposition analysis illustrates that CCBs can be decomposed as a composite of Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes with uneven fidelity, where the topological charges of LG modes align with multiples of the superimposed catastrophe beams but do not equal to the value of the OAM per photon within CCBs, emphasizing the intrinsic OAM within CCBs and the absence of a connection to phase vortices. Our findings not only advance the understanding of the relationship between OAM and phase vortices but also pave the way for different applications of OAM waves, catalyzing their development in optics and other domains., Comment: 8pages, 5 figures

We conducted a comprehensive study on the robust propagation of the same spot-size Gaussian beam (SSGB), same envelope Gaussian beam (SEGB), Circular Airy beam (CAB) and Circular Pearcey beam (CPB) in complex environments. Our findings clearly demonstrate that autofocusing beams exhibit higher stability in propagation compared with the Gaussian beams. To validate our results, we statistically analyze the intensity fluctuation of autofocusing beams and Gaussian beams. The analysis reveals that the intensity fluctuations of autofocusing beams are significantly smaller than that of Gaussian beams. Furthermore, we study the variation of the coherence factor and find that the coherence of autofocusing beams is better than that of Gaussian beams under turbulence. Additionally, we observe the change of the scintillation index (SI) with the propagation distance z, and our results show that autofocusing beams exhibit less oscillation than Gaussian beams, indicating that autofocusing beams propagate in complex environments with less distortion and fewer intensity fluctuation. Overall, our results suggest that autofocusing beams are promising for applications such as optical trapping and manipulation in complex environments. Our study provides valuable insights into the selection of stable beams that exhibit high intensity and high field gradient at the focal position in complex environments., Comment: 10pages, 6figures

We employed caustic theory to analyze the propagation dynamics of partially coherent self-accelerating beams such as self-healing of partially coherent Airy beams. Our findings revealed that as the spatial coherence decreases, the self-healing ability of beams increases. This result have been demonstrated both in simulation and experiment. This is an innovative application of the caustic theory to the field of partially coherent structured beams, and provides a comprehensive understanding of self-healing property. Our results have significant implications for practical applications of partially coherent beams in fields such as optical communication, encryption, and imaging., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

The self-accelerating beams such as the Airy beam show great potentials in many applications including optical manipulation, imaging and communication. However, their superior features during linear propagation could be easily corrupted by optical nonlinearity or spatial incoherence individually. Here we investigate how the interaction of spatial incoherence and nonlinear propagation affect the beam quality of Airy beam, and find that the two destroying factors can in fact balance each other. Our results show that the influence of coherence and nonlinearity on the propagation of partially incoherent Airy beams (PIABs) can be formulated as two exponential functions that have factors of opposite signs. With appropriate spatial coherence length, the PIABs not only resist the corruption of beam profile caused by self-focusing nonlinearity, but also exhibits less anomalous diffraction caused by the self-defocusing nonlinearity. Our work provides deep insight into how to maintain the beam quality of self-accelerating Airy beams by exploiting the interaction between partially incoherence and optical nonlinearity. Our results may bring about new possibilities for optimizing partially incoherent structured field and developing related applications such as optical communication, incoherent imaging and optical manipulations., Comment: 12pages,6 figures

Photonic analogs of the moir\'e superlattices mediated by interlayer electromagnetic coupling are expected to give rise to rich phenomena such as nontrivial flatband topology. Here, we propose and demonstrate a scheme to tune the flatbands in a bilayer moir\'e superlattice by employing the band offset. The band offset is changed by fixing the bands of one slab while shifting those of the other slab, which is accomplished by modifying the thickness of the latter slab. Our results show that the band-offset tuning not only makes some flatbands emerge and disappear, but also leads to two sets of flatbands that are robustly formed even with the change of band offset over a broad range. These robust flatbands form either at the AA-stack site or at the AB-stack site, and as a result, a single-cell superlattice can support a pair of high-quality localized modes with tunable frequencies. Moreover, we develop a diagrammatic model to provide an intuitive insight into the formation of the robust flatbands. Our work demonstrates a simple yet efficient way to design and control complex moir\'e flatbands, providing new opportunities to utilize photonic moir\'e superlattices for advanced light-matter interaction including lasing and nonlinear harmonic generation., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures

To date, second-harmonic generation (SHG) at nanoscale has been concentrated on employing high-refractive-index nanostructures, owing to the strong field confinement at deep subwavelength scales based on optically resonant effects. However, low-index nanostructures generally exhibit weaker resonant effects and lower field confinement. To address this issue, by harnessing the large nonlinearity of LiNbO$\mathrm{_3}$, we propose a novel approach to employ guided resonances and bound states in the continuum (BICs) with a LiNbO$\mathrm{_3}$ metasurface consisting of a LiNbO$\mathrm{_3}$ disk array sitting on a LiNbO3 thin film. Such a system can transform the guided modes supported by LiNbO$\mathrm{_3}$ thin film into high-quality guided resonances which can be excited directly under plane-wave illumination. Importantly, we further demonstrate strong field confinement inside LiNbO3 thin film with tailorable Q-factor by realising a Friedrich-Wintgen BIC. Such a unique mode engineering enables a record-high SHG efficiency of 5\% under a pump intensity as low as 0.4 $\mathrm{MW/cm^{2}}$. Moreover, we reveal the influence of nonlinear resonances and cross-coupling on the SHG by showing the anomalous SHG and efficiency tuning with the rotation of the crystal axis. Our work offers a new route to constructing enhanced SHG based on high-Q guided resonances and BICs, including low-index and high-index nonlinear materials., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures

Controlling light scattering by nanoparticles is fundamentally important for the understanding and the control of light with photonic nanostructures, as well as for nanoparticle scattering itself, including Mie scattering. Here, we theoretically and numerically investigate the possibility to manipulate nanoparticle scattering by wavefront shaping that was initially developed to control light scattered by large numbers of nanoparticles in nanophotonic media. By employing a scattering matrix analysis, we find that even a single nanoparticle supports multiple strongly scattering eigenchannels, suggesting wavefront shaping as a promising tool to manipulate scattered light of a single nanoparticle. By sending in shaped wavefronts, we selectively excite eigenchannels, as is apparent from the distinct field distributions. These scattering eigenchannels are related to different resonant leaky modes of the scatterer, that reveal remarkable localized "hot spots" where the field is substantially enhanced. Moreover, we investigate the backscattered spectra; to this send in wavefronts relevant for a particular eigenchannel, and observe that the backscattered spectrum reveals not only the excited channel but also several others. This result points to the existence of short and long-range spectral correlations for an eigenchannel. Our work offers a flexible tool to manipulate light scattering of a single nanoparticle, and thus opens new possibilities to control field patterns and light-matter interactions in a nanoparticle, as well as to explore new features of nanoparticle scattering such as the spectral correlation and temporal response of light scattered by nano scatterers, including Mie spheres., Comment: 8 pages, 2 tables, 4 figures

We show that customized optical patterns can be generated by employing feedback-based wavefront shaping without prior knowledge of the transmission matrix of optical systems. To control the spatial distribution of intensity within the target region, the overlap coefficient is employed as the key feedback signal for wavefront shaping, and the optimal phase pattern for generating the customized optical pattern is reached when the overlap coefficient converges to unity. By using the overlap-coefficient optimized wavefront shaping, we generate customized optical patterns such as multiple focused spots of different intensity, cat image, and speckle patterns of tailored intensity distribution. Besides, we also show that a sharp focusing spot can be generated in highly scattering systems with the overlap-coefficient optimized wavefront shaping, and the achieved signal-to-background ratio is much higher than that achieved with the conventional wavefront shaping. Our method provides new possibilities to control the interference of light for many applications, such as optical imaging, quantum interference, and optical trapping and manipulation., Comment: 5 pages,6 figures

We study the three-dimensional (3D) spatially-resolved distribution of the energy density of light in a 3D scattering medium upon the excitation of open transmission channels. The open transmission channels are excited by spatially shaping the incident optical wavefronts. To probe the local energy density, we excite isolated fluorescent nanospheres distributed inside the medium. From the spatial fluorescent intensity pattern we obtain the position of each nanosphere, while the total fluorescent intensity gauges the energy density. Our 3D spatially-resolved measurements reveal that the local energy density versus depth (z) is enhanced up to 26X at the back surface of the medium, while it strongly depends on the transverse (x; y) position. We successfully interpret our results with a newly developed 3D model that considers the time-reversed diffusion starting from a point source at the back surface. Our results are relevant for white LEDs, random lasers, solar cells, and biomedical optics.

Random scattering is usually viewed as a serious nuisance in optical imaging, and needs to be prevented in the conventional imaging scheme based on single-photon interference. Here we proposed a two-photon imaging scheme with the widely used lens replaced by a dynamic random medium. In contrast to destroying imaging process, the dynamic random medium in our scheme works as a crucial imaging element to bring constructive interference, and allows us to image an object from light field scattered by this dynamic random medium. On the one hand, our imaging scheme with incoherent two-photon illumination enables us to achieve super-resolution imaging with the resolution reaching Heisenberg limit. On the other hand, with coherent two-photon illumination, the image of a pure-phase object can be obtained in our imaging scheme. These results show new possibilities to overcome bottleneck of widely used single-photon imaging by developing imaging method based on multi-photon interference.

High-order coherence effects between two first-order incoherent sources with fully independent phases have been well studied in the literature, which shows interference fringes with respect to the position separations among different space points. Here we show that this is not the whole story, and find that the high-order coherence effects depend on the mode of the phase random walk of the first-order incoherent sources, which can be controlled artificially and represented geometrically by vectorial polygons. Interestingly, by scanning the detectors along the same direction with the position separations between them kept constant, a set of high-order coherence fringes, which fingerprint the phase random walk of the first-order incoherent sources, can be observed. Our results show that it is possible to control the high-order coherence of two first-order incoherent sources, which could have important practical applications such as superhigh resolution optical lithography., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

Two-photon interference with independent classical sources, in which superposition of two indistinguishable two-photon paths plays a key role, is of limited visibility of interference fringes with a maximum value of 50%. By using a random-phase grating to modulate the wavefront of a coherent light, we introduce superposition of multiple indistinguishable two-photon paths, which enhances the two-photon interference effect with a signature of visibility exceeding 50%. The result shows the importance of phase control in the control of high-order coherence of classical light., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

We propose a novel scheme to achieve two-photon super bunching of thermal light through multiple two-photon-path interference, in which two mutually first-order incoherent optical channels are introduced by inserting a modified Michelson interferometer into a traditional two-photon HBT interferometer, and the bunching peak-to-background ratio can reach 3 theoretically. Experimentally, the super bunching peak-to-background ratio was measured to be 2.4, much larger than the ratio 1.7 measured with the same thermal source in a traditional HBT interferometer. The peak-to-background ratio of two-photon super bunching of thermal light can be increased up to $2\times1.5^n$ by inserting cascadingly $n$ pairs of mutually first-order incoherent optical channels into the traditional two-photon HBT interferometer. The two-photon super bunching of thermal light should be of great significance in improving the visibility of classical ghost imaging., Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures