Full-Field Wavefront Shaping for Arbitrary Optical Vortex Generation with Phase-Only Holograms

Abstract Holography, a wavefront reconstruction technique, provides a powerful approach for engineering complex optical fields. However, conventional phase-only holographic approaches for optical vortex generation remain largely confined to specific vortex modes or single-diffraction-order encoding, thereby significantly limiting their design flexibility. Here, we demonstrate an inverse-designed holographic framework based on angular spectrum propagation that moves beyond conventional paradigms. By exploiting the full spatial degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the hologram for full-field wavefront shaping, we generate diverse exotic optical vortices with well-defined intensity and phase distributions. The framework is further extended to meta-holography by encoding the optimized phase profile onto a geometric-phase metasurface, enabling the high-fidelity generation of Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) beams. This work paves the way for practical holographic complex-amplitude control and opens new opportunities in optical communications, optical tweezers, and spatiotemporal vortex generation.