Elastic waves with correlated directional and orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom

Abstract

We introduce a formalism that enables the calculation of elastic wave functions supported by parallel arrays of coupled one-dimensional elastic waveguides. These wave functions are expressed as tensor products of a spinor part associated with directional degrees of freedom and an orbital angular momentum (OAM) part associated with the phase of the coupled waveguides. We demonstrate that one can construct wave functions as a superposition of these elastic waves, which cannot be written as a tensor product of a spinor part and an OAM part. These elastic wave functions are not separable in the tensor product Hilbert space of directional and OAM subspaces. We show that we can construct maximally nonseparable states that are similar to Bell states.