Coloured vortex beams with incoherent white light illumination

The orbital angular momentum is a fundamental degree of freedom of light wavefronts, currently exploited in applications where information capacity is a key requirement, such as optical communication, super-resolution imaging and high-dimensional quantum computing. However, generating orbital angular momentum beams requires spatio-temporally coherent light sources (lasers or supercontinuum sources), because incoherent light would smear out the doughnut features of orbital angular momentum beams, forming polychromatic or obscured orbital angular momentum beams instead. Here we show generation of coloured orbital angular momentum beams using incoherent white light. Spatio-temporal coherence is achieved by miniaturizing spiral phase plates and integrating them with structural colour filters, three-dimensionally printed at the nanoscale. Our scheme can in principle generate multiple helical eigenstates and combine colour information into orbital angular momentum beams independently. These three-dimensional optical elements encoded with colour and orbital angular momentum information substantially increase the number of combinations for optical anti-counterfeiting and photonic lock–key devices in a pairwise fashion.