High‐Speed Electrically Driven Liquid‐Crystal Compact Optical Skyrmion Encoder

Abstract

ABSTRACT Optical skyrmions are topologically nontrivial polarization textures with intrinsic robustness under external perturbations, making them promising carriers for disturbance‐resistant optical information transmission. However, existing optical skyrmion generation schemes mostly rely on static optical devices or fixed nanostructures, making high‐speed dynamic switching of the topological state difficult. Here, we propose a high‐speed switchable optical skyrmion encoder based on a compact liquid‐crystal spin‐orbit device. The device employs the in‐plane orientation of liquid crystal molecules to imprint a fixed Pancharatnam‐Berry geometric phase, while an applied voltage rapidly tunes the liquid‐crystal retardance. This electrical control enables reversible switching of the output state from a skyrmionic polarization texture to a uniformly polarized vortex and vice versa. Experimental results show that the device exhibits millisecond electrical response, with bidirectional response times of and ms, corresponding to an ideal cycling rate of approximately Hz, making it the fastest switchable optical skyrmion generator to date, to the best of our knowledge. Furthermore, by exploiting this rapid topological refreshing capability, we demonstrate image encoding and decoding, providing a new liquid‐crystal device platform for high‐speed, refreshable, and disturbance‐resistant topological optical information transmission.