Conservation and transfer of orbital angular momentum of light in optically induced photonic lattices

Abstract

Using analytical and numerical methods, we elucidate the conservation and transfer of orbital angular momentum of light beams propagating in fully periodic and radially periodic photonic lattices, induced in photorefractive crystals. We consider paraxial beams propagating in both fixed and interacting lattices, in both copropagating and counterpropagating geometries, in photorefractive media with saturable nonlinearity. We also discuss the influence of beam intensity and the finite lattice size on the angular momentum transfer in such photonic lattices.