Abstract
Light beams that carry orbital angular momentum are often approximated by modulating an initial beam, usually Gaussian, with an azimuthal phase variation to create a vortex beam. Such vortex beams are well defined azimuthally, but the radial profile is neglected in this generation approach. Here, we show that a consequence of this is that vortex beams carry very little energy in the desired zeroth radial order, as little as only a few percent of the incident power. We demonstrate this experimentally and illustrate how to overcome the problem by complex amplitude modulation of the incident field.
© 2016 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Chunyi Chen, Huamin Yang, Shoufeng Tong, and Yan Lou
Opt. Express 24(7) 6959-6975 (2016)
A. Volyar, E. Abramochkin, Ya. Akimova, M. Bretsko, and Yu. Egorov
Appl. Opt. 61(21) 6398-6407 (2022)
Mingjian Cheng, Lixin Guo, Jiangting Li, Qingqing Huang, Qi Cheng, and Dan Zhang
Appl. Opt. 55(17) 4642-4648 (2016)