Production of optical phase space vortices with non-locally distributed modeconverters

Abstract

Optical vortices have been observed in a wide variety of optical systems. They can beobserved directly in the wavefront of optical beams, or in the correlations between pairs ofentangled photons. We present a novel optical vortex which appears in a non-local plane ofthe two-photon phase space, composed of a single degree of freedom of each photon of anentangled pair. The preparation of this vortex can be viewed as a ‘non-local’ ordistributed mode converter. We show how these novel optical vortices of arbitraryorder can be prepared in the spatial degrees of freedom of entangled photons.