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The Airy beam has attracted great attention since it was proposed in 2007 due to its novel properties, such as non-diffraction, self-healing, and self-acceleration. However, the spin angular momentum (SAM), which is an intrinsic nature of light, has rarely been studied by the Airy beam. Here, we propose a kind of binary circular Airy beam (BCAB) with space-variant polarizations and vortex phases and study the SAM evolution of the BCAB during propagation. We find the effects of appearance and annihilation of SAM during the propagation of BCAB, and the SAM can be further manipulated by adjusting the initial phase and polarization distribution of BCAB. Moreover, the optical tube, optical needle, and optical cage carrying different SAMs are achieved in propagation, which can be applied in various regions, such as optical trapping and manipulation. The BCAB significantly enriches the family of structured light and provides a flexible control scheme of SAM, which can further promote the application of SAM in many fields.

As is known, quasi-periodicity attracts great attention in many scientific regions. For instance, the discovery of the quasicrystal was rewarded the Nobel Prize in 2011, leading to a series of its applications. However, in the area of manipulating optical fields, the two-dimensional quasi-periodicity is rarely considered. Here, we study the two-dimensional quasi-periodic diffraction properties of the scalar and vector optical fields based on the Penrose tiling, which is one of the most representative kinds of two-dimensional quasi-periodic patterns. We propose type-A and type-B Penrose tiling masks (PTMs) with phase modulation, and further show the diffraction properties of the optical fields passing through these masks. The intensity of the diffraction field holds a tenfold symmetry. It is proved that the iteration number n of the PTM shows the “weeding” function in the diffraction field, and this property is useful in filtering, shaping, and manipulating diffraction fields. Meanwhile, we also find that the diffraction patterns have the label of the Golden ratio, which can be applied in areas such as optical encryption and information transmission.