Design of a compact setup to generate and test optical vortex beams

PABON, D. O.; LEDESMA, S. A.; QUINTEIRO, G. F.; CAPELUTO, M. G.

Optica Pura y Aplicada

Sociedad Española de Óptica

Año: 2017 vol. 50 p. 289 - 295

We present a compact design to generate and test different vortex beams with orbital angular momentum (OAM). The design consists of a mask that contains both, a binary amplitude hologram and a pinhole. When the mask is illuminated and the pinhole is blocked, the hologram produces a vortex beam with OAM whose intensity distribution can be observed in the far field. When the pinhole is unblocked a reference wavefront is generated which allows testing interferometrically the spatial phase distribution of the beam. We numerically simulate the experiment for two kind of beams containing OAM: Laguerre-Gaussian like vortex beams and Mathieu beams.