1Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and School of Optical and Electronic Information, Wuhan, China
2Optics Valley Laboratory, Wuhan, China
3Shenzhen Institute of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
4Boston University, College of Engineering, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Recently, structured light beams have attracted substantial attention in many applications, including optical communications, imaging, optical tweezers, and quantum optics. We propose and experimentally demonstrate a reconfigurable structured light beam generator in order to generate diverse structured light beams with adjustable beam types, beam orders, and beam sizes. By controlling the sizes of generated free-space structured light beams, free-space orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams and vector beams are coupled into an air–core fiber. To verify that our structured light generator enables generating structured light with high beam quality, polarization distributions and mode purity of generated OAM beams and vector beams in both free space and air–core fiber are characterized. Such a structured light generator may pave the way for future applications based on higher-order structured light beams.