Optical aberrations place fundamental limits on the achievable resolution with focusing and imaging. In the context of structured light, optical imperfections and misalignments and perturbing media such as turbulent air, underwater and optical fibre distort the amplitude and phase of the light’s spatial pattern. Here we show that polarization inhomogeneity that defines vectorial structured light is immune to all such perturbations, provided they are unitary. As an example, we study the robustness of vector vortex beams propagating through highly aberrated systems, demonstrating that the inhomogeneous nature of polarization remains unaltered even as the medium itself changes. The unitary nature of the channel allows us to undo this change through a simple lossless operation. This approach paves the way to the versatile application of vectorial structured light, even through non-ideal optical systems, crucial in applications such as imaging and optical communication across noisy channels.

光学像差对聚焦和成像可实现的分辨率造成了根本限制。在结构光的背景下，光学缺陷和未对准以及扰动介质（例如湍流空气、水下和光纤）会扭曲光空间图案的幅度和相位。在这里，我们表明定义矢量结构光的偏振不均匀性不受所有此类扰动的影响，只要它们是单一的。例如，我们研究了通过高度像差系统传播的矢量涡旋光束的鲁棒性，表明即使介质本身发生变化，偏振的不均匀性也不会改变。通道的单一性允许我们通过简单的无损操作来撤消这种更改。