LAUSR

Compact devices provide new ways to generate and detect optical vortex beams A large-scale vortex is an extraordinary phenomenon to behold, be it a hurricane in the North Atlantic Ocean or the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. A vortex on a small scale is equally fascinating, especially when its quantum nature starts to emerge. Alexei Abrikosov won a Nobel Prize by introducing vortices in a phenomenological model to describe a new type of superconductor in 1950s (1), which turned out to be a feature of paired electrons in supercurrent. A very different type of vortex can be created for light (2). On pages 760 and 763 of this issue, Zhang et al. (3) and Ji et al. (4) demonstrate new ways to generate and detect such optical vortex beams on a tiny semiconductor chip.