Submissions Deadline: June 30, 2025

Publication Month: October 31,2025

Structured light refers to custom light fields with tailored phase, intensity or polarization. In the recent advances in the field, several classes of complex light beams with novel properties have been experimental produced, and have been successfully applied in many fields, such as Laguerre–Gaussian, elegant Gaussian beams, nondiffracting Bessel beams, accelerating light fields Airy beams. The structured light has found a wide variety of applications, such as optical manipulation, optical metrology, optical imaging, classical optical communications and quantum communications.  This feature issue will highlight research spanning all fields influenced by structured light. We encourage papers that are application based, exploring the use of structured light.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• •  Generating and tailoring of structured beams
• •  Detection of orbital angular momentum of vortex beams
• •  Vector vortex beams
• •  Spatiotemporal vortex beams and angular momentum
• •  Plasmonics vortices
• •  Applications of structured beams in optical manipulation, imaging, microscopy, quantum information and quantum communication, etc.

All submissions need to present original, previously unpublished work and will be subject to the normal standards and peer review processes of the journal. The standard Chinese Optics Letters Article Processing Charges will apply to all published papers. Please prepare manuscripts according to the author instructions for submission to Chinese Optics Letters and submit through ScholarOne online system, specifying from the drop-down menu that the manuscript is for the special issue on Structured Light: fundamentals and applications.

Special Issue Guest Editors:

Yuanjie Yang, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

Yangjian Cai, Shandong Normal University, China

Qiwen Zhan, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, China