Reconfigurable Generation and Spin Manipulation of Structured Beams Based on Cascaded Liquid Crystal Pancharatnam–Berry Phase Elements

Abstract Structured light, with spatially varying amplitude, phase, and polarization, has attracted widespread attention for its potential application in many fields ranging from optical communications to imaging. However, it remains a challenge to realize reconfigurable manipulation of structured light beams in a compact and convenient method. Here, through mechanical operations on the two cascaded liquid crystal Pancharatnam–Berry phase elements such as rotation and translation, diverse kinds of typical structured light can be experimentally generated in a reconfigurable manner, including Gaussian, Hermitian–Gaussian, vortex, and cylindrical vector beams. Moreover, by rotating a liquid crystal element, tunable photonic spin Hall effect is also achieved in the proposed cascaded‐elements scheme, which allows for tailoring the spin‐dependent shifts in the structured beams. In such a reconfigurable generator, the mechanical operations on the phase element bring new degrees of freedom into the manipulation of structured light field, which may pave the avenue for future optical applications.