Light propagation in a birefringent plates with topological charge

Abstract

We calculated the Fresnel paraxial propagator in a birefringent plate having topological charge $q$ at its center, named "$q$-plate". We studied the change of the beam transverse profile when it traverses the plate. An analytical closed form of the beam profile propagating in the "$q$-plate" can be found for many important specific input beam profiles. We paid particular attention to the plate having a topological unit charge and we found that if small losses due to reflection, absorption and scattering are neglected, the plate can convert the photon spin into orbital angular momentum with up to 100% efficiency, provided the thickness of the plate is less than the Rayleigh range of the incident beam.

3 pages and 3 figures. Optics Letters style

References in corpus (4)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Hypergeometric-Gaussian Modes
• Pancharatnam-Berry phase optical elements for wavefront shaping in the visible domain: switchable helical modes generation
• Spin-induced angular momentum switching

Cited by in corpus (33)

• Quantum information transfer from spin to orbital angular momentum of photons
• Efficient generation and sorting of orbital angular momentum eigenmodes of light by thermally tuned q-plates
• Quantum walks and wavepacket dynamics on a lattice with twisted photons
• Photonic quantum walk in a single beam with twisted light
• Generation and dynamics of optical beams with polarization singularities
• Measuring the complex orbital angular momentum spectrum and spatial mode decomposition of structured light beams
• Machine learning-based classification of vector vortex beams
• Experimental engineering of arbitrary qudit states with discrete-time quantum walks
• Polarization control of single photon quantum orbital angular momentum states
• Polarization-controlled evolution of light transverse modes and associated Pancharatnam geometric phase in orbital angular momentum
• Arbitrary optical wavefront shaping via spin-to-orbit coupling
• Multi-twist polarization ribbon topologies in highly-confined optical fields
• Single-photon spin-orbit entanglement violating a Bell-like inequality
• Radial coherent and intelligent states of paraxial wave equation
• Reconstructing the Poynting vector skew angle and wave-front of optical vortex beams via two-channel moiré deflectometery
• Topological features of vector vortex beams perturbed with uniformly polarized light
• Generation of vector beams with liquid crystal disclination lines
• Efficient generation and control of different order orbital angular momentum states for communication links
• Interplay between diffraction and the Pancharatnam-Berry phase in inhomogeneously twisted anisotropic media
• Spin constrained orbital angular momentum control in high-harmonic generation
• Universal unitary gate for single-photon spinorbit four-dimensional states
• Resilience of orbital angular momentum qubits and effects on hybrid entanglement
• Liquid crystal spatial-mode converters for the orbital angular momentum of light
• Enhanced detection techniques of Orbital Angular Momentum states in the classical and quantum regimes
• A general theorem on the divergence of vortex beams
• Spin and Orbital angular momentum propagation in anisotropic media: theory
• Full spatial characterization of entangled structured photons
• Photon Self-Induced Spin to Orbital Conversion in TGG crystal at high laser power
• Waveguiding driven by the Pancharatnam-Berry phase
• Scattering of plane-wave and twisted photons by helical media
• Optical mode conversion via spatiotemporally modulated atomic susceptibility
• Generation of the Complete Bell Basis via Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference
• Exploring spatial dispersion in helical wired media: An effective field theory approach