Spin and Orbital angular momentum propagation in anisotropic media: theory

Abstract

This paper is devoted to study the propagation of light beams carrying orbital angular momentum in optically anisotropic media. We first review some properties of homogeneous anisotropic media, and describe how the paraxial formalism is modified in order to proceed with a new approach dealing with a general setting of paraxial propagation along uniaxial inhomogeneous media. This approach is suitable for describing the space-variant-optical-axis phase plates.

References in corpus (6)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Quantum information transfer from spin to orbital angular momentum of photons
• Light propagation in a birefringent plates with topological charge
• Polarization control of single photon quantum orbital angular momentum states
• Spin-induced angular momentum switching
• Manipulation of single-photon states encoded in transverse spatial modes: possible and impossible tasks