Angular Momentum Properties And Generation Of Optical Vortices

Optical vortices are intriguing objects that attract much attention and displayfascinating properties for a well-defined orbital angular momentum and helical phasewavefront. The unique nature of vortex fields is expected to lead to applications in manyareas that include optical micromanipulation, atomic optics, biomedicine, nonlinearoptics, or the optical transmission of information. The objective of this thesis is toexplore the angular momentum properties of optical vortices and their possibleapplications, and propose to high efficient and flexible creation of different opticalvortices with spatial light modulators in experiment.The whole paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter 1: The history and the main developments of the optical vortices are reviewed, and the main applications are also summarized. In addition, the main contents of the thesis and our research results in the field are given.Chapter 2: The fundamental theory of optical vortices is introduced. Firstly optical vortices is defined and described in mathematics specifically. Then, we deduce the angular momentum of optical vortices within the paraxial approximation and unapproximation theory, demonstrated that optical vortices really have a well-defined orbital angular momentum. Experiments of measuring the orbital angular momentum of light and indicating the transfer of orbital and spin angular momentum from light to matter in different conditions are introduced. The mechanical effect of light is explained, and two effects, rotational frequency shift and second harmonic generation, associated with optical vortices is introduce. Finally, the propagation dynamics of optical vortices in linear and nonlinear media is explained simply.Chapter 3: Different methods for generating optical vortices are summarized, including direct formation inside a special designed laser resonator, by spiral phase plates, geometrical optics mode converters, computer-generated holograms...