Orbital Angular Momentum in Fibers

Abstract

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light beams with helical phase front, as an alternative spatial dimension resource of photons, has attracted extensive attention over the past decades. Very recently, OAM in fibers has facilitated rapid development of various fiber-based applications, such as optical communications, optical manipulation, optical sensing, optical imaging, nonlinear optics, and quantum science. Comprehensive and in-depth understanding of OAM in fibers is of great interest to researchers in this area. Here, we give a tutorial overview of OAM in fibers. We first introduce the basic theories, including the eigenmode analysis method, mode coupling theory, and spin-orbit mapping of light in fibers. We then give a detailed classification of OAM fibers and discuss versatile spatial mode bases in fibers. After that, we review various OAM fiber designs, including conventional single-mode fibers, conventional multi-mode fibers, ring-core fibers, air-core fibers, photonic crystal fibers, negative-curvature hollow-core fibers, multi-core fibers, active fibers (e.g., erbium-doped fibers), etc. Besides, we describe the state-of-the-art commercial fiber manufacturing processes as well as testing and characterization methods for OAM fibers. We also review various active and passive OAM fiber devices. Moreover, we introduce several typical advanced applications based on OAM fibers, such as capacity scaling fiber-optic communications, remote vectorial Doppler velocimetry, super-resolution optical imaging, and high-dimensional quantum cryptography. Finally, we briefly discuss future challenges and prospects of OAM in fibers.