Optical forces generated by interaction between light and biomaterials induce an optical waveguide, leading to a deep penetration of light in a scattering suspension.
In contrast, we report on the optical vortex induced exotic nonlinear phenomena not only the conventional self-trapping effects.
A 532 nm continuous-wave right-/left-handed first-order optical vortex was focused to be an annular spot with a diameter of 40 um in cyanobacteria suspensions, where their nonlinearity was controlled by appropriately mixing seawater and glycerol. The incident optical vortex underwent strong self-defocusing effects in the suspensions with a high mixing ratio of glycerol, resulting in the creation of the dark soliton.
The spatial symmetry breaking of the incident optical vortex further occurred in the moderate mixing ratio, manifesting the modal instability effects. Furthermore, the broken optical vortex then rotated towards a clockwise/anticlockwise direction assigned by its handedness.
We report on the generation of a spinning twin-mode with two bright spots in a biomaterial, bacteriorhodopsin (bR), suspension pumped by an optical vortex. The spinning direction of the twin-mode is fully assigned by the handedness of the incident optical vortex. This phenomenon occurs owing to the spatial soliton effects in the bR suspension.
Optical vortex possesses an annular intensity profile and an optical orbital angular momentum arising from its helical wavefront. In particular, it is noteworthy that optical vortex can twist the irradiated materials, such as silicon, metal, and polymer, to form chiral structures.
In this paper, we report on a spatial symmetry breaking of optical vortex propagating through bacteriorhodopsin (bR) suspensions. A 1 µm picosecond optical vortex mode propagated through bR suspensions (concentration: ~10 µM diluted in a 16 % NaCl solution) was broken into a twin mode with two bright spots. Also, the twin mode rotated towards a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction assigned by the handedness of the incident optical vortex mode. The rotation speed of the twin mode was measured to be 0.05 cycle/second. It was worth mentioning that such symmetry breaking of the optical vortex mode manifests an interaction between a helical wavefront and a helical bacteriorhodopsin. In fact, this phenomenon was never observed by using a NaCl solution without bacteriorhodopsin.
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