Nonlinear optics: A surprise in store?: At ultrafast data rates, the ability to use light to control things could speed information processing. However, photons tend not to interact with each other, and so a nonlinear optical material is needed and the response of such materials is typically weak. Alam et al. report a surprising finding: that indium tin oxide, a commercially available transparent conducting oxide widely used in microelectronics, exhibits a large nonlinear response. They used a wavelength regime where the permittivity of the material is close to zero and observed a large and fast nonlinear optical response. The finding offers the possibility that other, so far unexplored, materials may be out there for nonlinear optical applications. Science , this issue p. 795

Light beams with a helical phase-front possess orbital angular momentum along their direction of propagation in addition to the spin angular momentum that describes their polarisation. Until recently, it was thought that these two ‘rotational’ motions of light were largely independent and could not be coupled during light–matter interactions. However, it is now known that interactions with carefully designed complex media can result in spin-to-orbit coupling, where a change of the spin angular momentum will modify the orbital angular momentum and vice versa. In this work, we propose and demonstrate that the birefringence of plasmonic nanostructures can be wielded to transform circularly polarised light into light carrying orbital angular momentum. A device operating at visible wavelengths is designed from a space-variant array of subwavelength plasmonic nano-antennas. Experiment confirms that circularly polarised light transmitted through the device is imbued with orbital angular momentum of ±2ħ (with conversion efficiency of at least 1%). This technology paves the way towards ultrathin orbital angular momentum generators that could be integrated into applications for spectroscopy, nanoscale sensing and classical or quantum communications using integrated photonic devices.