2015/12/02 by Yue Pan, Pan, Yue, Xu-Zhen Gao +14
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Characterization and Applications of Magnetic Nanoparticles #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Optics (physics.optics) #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1512.00595
arxiv created 2015/12/02 · openalex publication_date 2015/12/02 · arxiv updated 2015/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of photons, as a new fundamental degree of freedom, has excited a great diversity of interest, because of a variety of emerging applications. Arbitrarily tunable OAM has gained much attention, but its creation remains still a tremendous challenge. We demonstrate the realization of well-controlled arbitrary OAM in both theory and experiment. We present the concept of general OAM, which extends the OAM carried by the scalar vortex field to the OAM carried by the azimuthally varying polarized vector field. The arbitrary OAM has the same characteristics as the well-defined integer OAM: intrinsic OAM, uniform local OAM and intensity ring, and propagation stability. The arbitrary OAM has unique natures: it is allowed to be flexibly tailored and the radius of the focusing ring can have various choices for a desired OAM, which are of great significance to the benefit of surprising applications of the arbitrary OAM.