The angular momentum state of light can be described by positions on a higher-order Poincaré (HOP) sphere, where superpositions of spin and orbital angular momentum states give rise to laser beams that have found many applications, including optical communication, quantum information processing, microscopy, optical trapping and tweezing and materials processing. Many techniques exist to create such beams but none to date allow their creation at the source. Here we report on a new class of laser that is able to generate all states on the HOP sphere. We exploit geometric phase control with a non-homogenous polarization optic and a wave-plate inside a laser cavity to map spin angular momentum (SAM) to orbital angular momentum (OAM). Rotation of these two elements provides the necessary degrees of freedom to traverse the entire HOP sphere. As a result, we are able to demonstrate that the OAM degeneracy of a standard laser cavity may be broken, producing pure OAM modes as the output, and that generalized vector vortex beams may be created from the same laser, for example, radially and azimuthally polarized laser beams. It is noteworthy that all other aspects of the laser cavity follow a standard design, facilitating easy implementation.

No abstract

A procedure for the real-time analysis of laser modes using a phase-only spatial light modulator is outlined. The procedure involves encoding into digital holograms by complex amplitude modulation a set of orthonormal basis functions into which the initial field is decomposed. This approach allows any function to be encoded and refreshed in real time (60 Hz). We implement a decomposition of guided modes propagating in optical fibers and show that we can successfully reconstruct the observed field with very high fidelity.

No abstract