Sorting light's radial momentum and orbital angular momentum with a parabola-like lens

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parabola-like lens that efficiently sorts light's orbital angular momentum and radial momentum, enabling full transverse momentum characterization for advanced optical and quantum applications.

Contribution

A novel parabola-like lens design that separates orbital angular momentum and radial momentum in light fields, facilitating complete transverse momentum analysis.

Findings

Successfully separates individual angular and radial momentum states.

Capable of handling multiple superposition states.

Potential for high-efficiency quantum light applications.

Abstract

The orbital angular momentum and radial momentum both describe the transverse momentum of a light field. Efficient discriminating and sorting the two kinds of momentum lies at the heart of further application. Here, we propose a parabola-like lens that can transform the orbital angular momentum and the radial momentum into different positions in the parabolas. We experimentally characterize the performance of our implementation by separating individual angular and radial momentum as well as the multiple superposition states. The reported scheme can achieve two kinds of transverse momentum identification and thus provide a possible way to complete the characterization of the full transverse momentum of an optical field. The proposed device can readily be used in multiplexing and demultiplexing of optical information, and in principle, achieve unit efficiency, and thus can be suitable for applications that involve quantum states of light.