Surface relief formation with light possessing multiple vortices

We report the first demonstration of surface relief formation by irradiating material with non-degenerate hybrid vortex modes. These modes are formed via the coherent superposition of two Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) modes with different orbital angular momentum (OAM) indices, and they carry non-zero OAM. Intriguingly, the spatially localized vortex fields, which are associated with multiple phase singularities of the non-degenerate hybrid vortex modes and spin angular momentum (SAM) of circular polarization, can be visualized as fist-like protrusions produced within the fabricated surface relief structures. This demonstration offers new insights into fundamental light–matter interactions via SAM-OAM coupling effects and opens the door to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying the formation of vortex lattices and vortex–antivortex pairs in condensed matter physics. This demonstration also provides a method for fabricating chiral surface relief structures with an odd number of spiral arms, which may be utilized in advanced optical data storage and chiral metasurface applications.