Single-Step Shaping of the Orbital Angular Momentum Spectrum of Light

Abstract

Control of orbital angular momentum (OAM) in optical fields has seen tremendous growth of late, with a myriad of tools existing for their creation and detection. What has been lacking is the ability to arbitrarily modify the OAM spectrum of a superposition in amplitude and phase, especially if a priori knowledge of the initial OAM spectrum is absent. Motivated by a quasi-mapping that exists between the position and OAM of Laguerre-Gaussian modes, we propose an approach for single-step modulation of a field's OAM spectrum. We outline the concept and implement it through the use of binary ring apertures encoded on spatial light modulators. We show that complete control of the OAM spectrum is achievable in a single step, fostering applications in classical and quantum information processing that utilise the OAM basis.

References in corpus (3)

• Electromagnetic Angular Momentum
• Electromagnetic Force and Momentum
• Quantitative orbital angular momentum measurement of perfect vortex beams

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Probing the limits of vortex mode generation and detection with spatial light modulators
• Programmable Unitary Operations for Orbital Angular Momentum Encoded States
• Nonlinear manipulation of orbital angular momentum spectra with second- and third- harmonic generation in a quasi-periodically poled crystal