Optical fibers provide an excellent platform for transmitting light over long distances, manipulating it and enhancing light-matter interaction. Now, the “Ultrafast & Twisted Photonics” research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) has developed a new hollow-core fiber that selectively guides optical vortices depending on their helicity and has potential applications in chiral sensing, vortex mode generation, and optical communications.

The results were recently published in the journal ACS Photonics.

In addition to transmitting light over long distances, optical waveguides provide convenient ways of enhancing the interaction of light with matter and manipulating the properties of the guided light. Among several light attributes, pure polarization states are crucial for many applications and research areas.