Oral presentation

Session Information

Location: Science and Cultural Center - FORTH
Day: 1. Wednesday 16th
Time: 16:00-16:30
Chairperson: to be announced…

Presentation Details

Presentation Type: Oral presentation
Title: Topological Memory of Optical Vortices: From Chiral Persistence to Dynamic Disorder
Abstract: Topological textures are valued because they preserve information under disorder and perturbation. While this principle underpins the remarkable stability of skyrmions, domain walls and magnetic vortices, its implications for photonic topology remain largely unexplored. We demonstrate that optical vortices carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) exhibit a hierarchy of previously unrecognized memory effects, establishing topology as a robust information channel in complex scattering systems. We show that multiple scattering does not necessarily erase the topological state of light. Instead, optical vortices retain a measurable memory of their helical phase structure long after conventional observables have lost correlation. This OAM memory reveals that topology and optical coherence are fundamentally distinct quantities in disordered media. We further demonstrate chiral memory, where the handedness of vortex states remains detectable after propagation through strongly scattering biological tissues. The effect enables direct access to tissue chirality and has revealed sensitive optical biomarkers associated with diabetes and metabolic dysfunction. Most importantly, we introduce dynamic topological memory, a new regime in which the topology of twisted light survives dynamic scattering. In multiply scattering laminar flows, the vortex phase structure persists beyond the decorrelation time of the scattered field, whereas Brownian motion and turbulence destroy both coherence and topology. This establishes dynamic topological memory as a unique signature of directed transport and identifies optical topology as a fundamentally new probe of blood flow and haemodynamics. Finally, we show that topological observables derived from optical vortices provide access to structural and dynamical information unavailable to conventional intensity-, polarization- or speckle-based approaches. Emerging results indicate that topological signatures are sensitive to pathological changes in tissue architecture and may provide a new route toward topology-enabled cancer diagnostics. These findings establish optical vortices as functional topological textures whose information content can survive disorder, chirality and directed dynamics. More broadly, they reveal topological memory as a universal photonic phenomenon and position structured light as a platform for topological sensing in complex biological systems.

Presenter

Prof Igor Meglinski
Aston University | United Kingdom

Authors

1. Meglinski, Igor | Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies, Aston University, Birmingham, UK