Light with momentum

Control of orbital angular momentum of light with optical fibers.

We present a fiber-based method for generating vortex beams with a tunable value of orbital angular momentum from -1ℏ to +1ℏ per photon. We propose a new (to our knowledge) method to determine the modal content of the fiber and demonstrate high purity of the desired vortex state (97% after 20 m, even after bends and twists). This method has immediate utility for the multitude of applications in...

Light-particle Emission at High Angular Momentum

Orbital angular momentum and nonparaxial light beams

The simple relationship between total angular momentum and energy and the seemingly natural separation of the angular momentum into spin and orbital components in the paraxial approximation, are investigated for a general nonparaxial form of monochromatic beam with near cylindrical symmetry.

Chirality and the angular momentum of light

Chirality is exhibited by objects that cannot be rotated into their mirror images. It is far from obvious that this has anything to do with the angular momentum of light, which owes its existence to rotational symmetries. There is nevertheless a subtle connection between chirality and the angular momentum of light. We demonstrate this connection and, in particular, its significance in the conte...

Efficient separation of the orbital angular momentum eigenstates of light.

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light is an attractive degree of freedom for fundamental studies in quantum mechanics. In addition, the discrete unbounded state-space of OAM has been used to enhance classical and quantum communications. Unambiguous measurement of OAM is a key part of all such experiments. However, state-of-the-art methods for separating single photons carrying a large number ...