The use of soft matter in photonics open up new opportunities as it offers a way to circumvent demanding manufacturing processes based on nanotechnologies whenever there is need to reach submicron resolution while imparting topological properties to matter at larger spatial scale. Liquid crystal materials suits well to such aim owing to their capabilities to self-organize into complex 3D anisotropic architectures, spontaneously or under the action of external fields (electric, magnetic, light, temperature, mechanical stresses, etc.). This allows proposing novel spin-orbit photonics devices exploiting the coupling between the polarization state of light and all its spatial degrees of freedom.

Liquid crystals and their possible mixture with polymers are known to be premium optical materials, as evidenced by LCD technologies. It is also known since five decades that liquid crystals can host localized elastic excitations. This allows proposing the development of novel strategies to produce non-magnetic materials acting as erasable and rewritable memories triggered by light. Moreover, as liquid crystals can interact with light in an active manner, one can consider the development of non-solid-state technology for processing light.

Living systems exhibit some of the world’s most complex optical systems that are used in many biological processes such as vision, communication, camouflage and photosynthesis. Manipulation of all degrees of freedom of light (amplitude, phase, polarization) can be at work, separately or together, in such complex optical materials  architectures. Still, little is known about biosystems situations where both polarization state and spatial degree of freedom are coupled, which is the case for inhomogeneous anisotropic media. Living materials being often endowed with conditions prone to reveal the optical spin-orbit interaction, we are interested to unveil and exploit biomimetic or biogenic structures, thereby considering spin-orbit photonics from a biological perspective.