Topological radiation from vortex masers

Haoye Qin, Rongrong Xiang, Amir Jafargholi, Zhe Zhang and Romain Fleury ()
Additional contact information
Haoye Qin: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory of Wave Engineering
Rongrong Xiang: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory of Wave Engineering
Amir Jafargholi: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory of Wave Engineering
Zhe Zhang: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory of Wave Engineering
Romain Fleury: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory of Wave Engineering

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Vortex singularities in acoustic and electromagnetic fields are instrumental degrees of freedom in advanced wavefront-shaping schemes and robust high-throughput communications. Laser sources that emit coherent vortices in free space have been demonstrated at optical frequencies, however their microwave counterparts, vortex masers, have remained entirely unexplored, despite their promising application potential as low-noise quantum sources and sensors. Here, we demonstrate a room-temperature maser emitting pulses of electromagnetic radiation with polarization and phase vortices, based on the physics of 3D topological vectorial singularities. Nontrivial microwave photons with polarization winding are emitted from a maser made of a subwavelength dielectric cavity filled with an organic gain medium. By topping the cavity with a chiral metasurface, the circular polarizations decouple, allowing the masing of pulses with nonzero orbital angular momentum revealed through nontrivial wavefront winding. Our work paves the way for multidimensional vortex and singularity emission from volumetric coherent microwave sources, topological photonic radiation, and novel practical applications of masers.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65787-9 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-65787-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-65787-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().