Experimental detection of high-order or fractional orbital angular momentum of light based on a robust mode converter

Abstract

Based on our constructed robust π/2 mode converter, we report a concise yet high-efficient experiment to realize the detection of both high-order and fractional orbital angular momentum (OAM). The π/2 mode converter that consists of a pair of cylindrical lens is actually not new. However, our experiment shows clearly its excellent robustness, as we have detected the high-order OAM numbers up to ℓ=100 carried by standard Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes. The observed patterns of two-dimensional optical lattices indicate that the radial index p of LG beams can be straightforwardly inferred as well. The versatility of the converter is also manifested by input modified LG beams carrying tunable fractional OAM, where we observe the output lattices exhibiting an interesting evolvement from Hermite-Gaussian mode HGm,0 to its adjacent HGm+1,0. Numeric simulations based on OAM eigen-mode decomposition support the experimental results. Our demonstration has potential in both classical and quantum information applications where high OAM modes are needed.