Optical vortices (OVs) promise to greatly enhance optical information capacity via orbital angular momentum multiplexing. The need for the on-chip integration of orbital angular momentum technologies has prompted research into subwavelength-confined polaritonic OVs. However, the topological order imprinted by the structure used for transduction from free-space beams to surface polaritons is inherently fixed after fabrication. Here we overcome this limitation via dispersion-driven topological charge multiplication. We switch the OV topological charge within a small frequency range (~3%) by leveraging the strong sublinear dispersion of low-loss surface phonon polaritons on silicon carbide membranes. Applying the Huygens principle, we quantitatively evaluate the topological order of experimental OVs detected by near-field imaging. We further explore the deuterogenic effect, which predicts the coexistence of multiple topological charges in higher-order polaritonic OVs. Our work demonstrates a viable method to manipulate the topological charge of polaritonic OVs, paving the way for the exploration of novel orbital-angular-momentum-enabled light–matter interactions at mid-infrared frequencies.

光学涡旋（OV）有望通过轨道角动量复用极大地增强光学信息容量。对轨道角动量技术片上集成的需求促进了对亚波长限制极化子 OV 的研究。然而，用于从自由空间光束转换到表面极化子的结构所印记的拓扑顺序在制造后本质上是固定的。在这里，我们通过色散驱动的拓扑电荷倍增克服了这一限制。我们利用碳化硅膜上低损耗表面声子极化子的强亚线性色散，在小频率范围 (~3%) 内切换 OV 拓扑电荷。应用惠更斯原理，我们定量评估了近场成像检测到的实验 OV 的拓扑顺序。我们进一步探索了重生效应，它预测了高阶极化子 OV 中多个拓扑电荷的共存。我们的工作展示了一种操纵极化OVs拓扑电荷的可行方法，为探索中红外频率下新型轨道角动量光与物质相互作用铺平了道路。