Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Orbital Angular Momentum Carrying Light Beams

Surendra Pal Singh

University of Arkansas, USA

Light beams can carry intrinsic (spin) as well as orbital angular momentum. Most lasers, however, emit light beams of zero orbital angular momentum, which have planar or spherical phase fronts. We discuss how these beams can be transformed into laser beams of nonzero orbital angular momentum, which have twisted phase fronts. Experiments for realizing such beams and observations of many unexpected features in their interference, diffraction and polarization experiments will be presented.