ELECTRO-OPTICS LABORATORY

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Roadmap on singular optics and its applications

Ganesh M. Balasubramaniam, Srinivasa Rao Allam, Vijayakumar Anand, Md Haider Ansari, Francis Gracy Arockiaraj, Shlomi Arnon, Purnesh Singh Badavath, Mansi Baliyan, Petr Bouchal, Zdeněk Bouchal, Sakshi Choudhary, Ahmed H. Dorrah, Yuxiang Duan, Kelsey Everts, Andrew Forbes, Matthew R. Foreman, Darius Gailevičius, Akanksha Gautam, Greg Gbur, Shivasubramanian Gopinath, Narmada Joshi, Saulius Juodkazis, Olga Korotkova, Kaupo Kukli, Judy Kupferman, Praveen Kumar, Ravi Kumar, Vijay Kumar, Gokul Manavalan, Ayush Mehra, Naveen K. Nishchal, Takashige Omatsu, Cade Peters, Andra Naresh Kumar Reddy, Salla Gangi Reddy, Valeria Rodríguez-Fajardo, Carmelo Rosales-Guzmán, Joseph Rosen, Sarita, Allarakha Shikder, Rakesh Kumar Singh, Xinzhou Su, Aile Tamm, Ganesh Velagala, Petr Viewegh, Eulàlia Puig Vilardell, Alan E. Willner, Agnes Pristy Ignatius Xavier, Amit Yadav, Huibin Zhou

Singular optics is a branch of modern electromagnetics and optics that investigates solutions to Maxwell’s equations that exhibit nontrivial topological features under various boundary conditions. These solutions give rise to light fields containing singularities, points or regions at which certain optical properties, such as phase or polarization, become undefined. Over time, singular optics has evolved into a unifying framework for understanding and engineering optical fields that possess phase, polarization, coherence, and spatiotemporal singularities, each characterized by quantized topological properties. Such structured light fields enable high-dimensional information encoding, robust light–matter interactions, and sensitive probing of complex media, thereby impacting optical communication, imaging, sensing, and materials processing. Parallel advances in theory, fabrication techniques, detection hardware, and computational methods have created a diverse and rapidly expanding landscape, underscoring the need for an integrated and forward-looking perspective. This roadmap synthesizes emerging applications of singular optics across multiple platforms, offering a concise overview of current developments and highlighting key physical concepts, new architectures, and transformative technologies that bridge subfields. In addition to reflecting the insights of leading contributors to these research directions, it also surveys selected recent advances, providing a concise overview of current trends and a foundation for shaping the future of singular optics and its applications.

Publication language	English
Journal	Applied Physics B: Lasers and Optics
Volume	132
Publication status	Published - 08.04.2026
	58

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

General Physics and Astronomy