Quantum Formulation of Fractional Orbital Angular Momentum

Abstract

The quantum theory of rotation angles (S. M. Barnett and D. T. Pegg, Phys. Rev. A, 41, 3427-3425 (1990)) is generalised to non-integer values of the orbital angular momentum. This requires the introduction of an additional parameter, the orientation of a phase discontinuity associated with fractional values of the orbital angular momentum. We apply our formalism to the propagation of light modes with fractional orbital angular momentum in the paraxial and non-paraxial regime.

14 pages, 6 figure (figures are of low quality due to jpeg2ps conversion), submitted to J Mod Opt special issue for the Photon 06 conference

References in corpus (2)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Experimental demonstration of fractional orbital angular momentum entanglement of two photons

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