Highly customized and miniaturized structured light is expected in many application fields. A kind of structured vortex generators is proposed based on a metasurface consisting of rectangular nanoholes etched in a silver film, and the generated vortices with the same or different topological charges are distributed along the radial direction. The geometric metasurface is completed with the help of optical holography technology, and the structured vortex generator possesses high working efficiency and large information capacity. The proposed vortex generators work under circularly polarized light illumination, and the reproduced vortices of multiplexing vortex generator depend on the handedness of the circularly polarized light. This work paves a way to generate new structured light fields. The radially distributed vortices may be utilized to simultaneously screen or separate microparticles. The compact design of the structured vortex generator and the convenient switch of different structured vortices will be a benefit to expand the applications of structured vortex fields.

An algorithm is proposed for the fast reconstruction of off-axis digital holograms based on a combination of complex encoding (CE) and spatial multiplexing (SM). In this algorithm, every two off-axis holograms recorded in sequence are first assembled into a CE hologram using the CE method, and then four of the CE holograms are again encoded into one complex spatial multiplexing (CSM) hologram based on the SM algorithm. It is demonstrated that the eight holograms encoded into such one CSM hologram can be quickly reconstructed by performing a two-dimensional (2D) Fourier transform (FT) on the CSM hologram. Using this method, the eight 2D FTs required for the reconstruction of the eight holograms in the conventional spatial filtering methods can be simplified to a process with only one 2D FT, which can largely improve the computation efficiency with the resolution of the reconstructed images nearly unchanged.

A setup for the generation of arbitrary vector beams is proposed. The setup mainly consists of a spatial light modulator (SLM), an angle-adjustable polarization beam splitter modulator, and a spatial filtering imaging system. Compared with the system using a birefringent beam splitter with a non-adjustable splitting angle, the polarization splitting angle of the improved setup can be adjusted by slightly rotating the related mirrors, which will bring more convenience when different wavelengths and different pixel sizes of SLMs are involved. The experimental results also demonstrate that the setup possesses a good polarization-selective imaging ability, which reveals that the setup may also be useful in polarization-selective spatial filtering imaging and polarization-encoded encryption.