Direct generation of tunable orbital angular momentum beams in microring lasers with broadband exceptional points

Non-Hermitian exceptional points (EPs) represent a special type of degeneracy where not only the eigenvalues coalesce, but also the eigenstates tend to collapse on each other. Recent studies have shown that, in the presence of an EP, light–matter interactions are profoundly modified, leading to a host of unexpected optical phenomena ranging from enhanced sensitivity to chiral light transport. Here we introduce a family of unidirectional resonators based on a novel type of broadband exceptional points. In active settings, the resulting unidirectionality exhibits resilience to perturbations, thus, providing a robust and tunable approach for directly generating beams with distinct orbital angular momenta (OAM). This work could open up new possibilities for manipulating OAM degrees of freedom in applications pertaining to telecommunications and quantum information sciences, while at the same time may expand the notions of non-Hermiticity in the orbital angular momentum space