Abstract
Optical vortices, i.e. helical light beams, carry a donut spatial intensity profile and an orbital angular
momentum, arising from their helical wavefronts. In recent years, they have been intensely studied in a
variety of fields, such as optical tweezer and manipulation, optical telecommunication, quantum
information, and fluorescence microscope. In particular, we and our co-workers discovered that optical
vortices twist melted or vaporized materials to establish chiral structured materials on a nano/micro
scale. Such chiral structures allow potentially the development of chirality sensors, chiral chemical
reactors, and optical meta-materials.
In this article, we review various chiral structures formation based on orbital angular momentum transfer
effects. We also address the spin-orbital angular momentum coupling effects in chiral surface relief
formation in an azo-polymer film.
