Probing the orbital angular momentum spectrum of complex incoherent mixtures

Publications

Probing the orbital angular momentum spectrum of complex incoherent mixtures

Year : 2019

Publisher : SPIEspie@spie.org

Source Title : Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Document Type :

Abstract

Spatially incoherent light can result from nonlinear processes where a group of photons are emitted in entangled states of spatial modes, which results in an incoherent mixture of constituting spatial modes when the photons are assessed one by one. In this paper we explore a method which uses a tilted lens to probe the orbital angular momentum (OAM) spectrum of such a mixture. We examine the general case where the photons are in mixtures of both different OAM and radial modes, resulting in a 2-dimensional random distribution that creates a more difficult challenge compared to mixtures of OAM only.