Twisted Laguerre-Gaussian Schell-model beam and its orbital angular moment

Opt Express. 2018 Dec 24;26(26):33956-33969. doi: 10.1364/OE.26.033956.

Abstract

It is well known that a light beam with vortex phase or twist phase carries orbital angular momentum (OAM), while twist phase only exists in a partially coherent beam. In this paper, we introduce a new partially coherent beam, named twisted Laguerre-Gaussian Schell-model (TLGSM) beam. This TLGSM beam carries both vortex phase and twist phase. Further, the evolutional properties of the spectral density and spectral degree of coherence (SDOC)] of the TLGSM beam passing through a paraxial ABCD optical system are explored in detail. Our results reveal that the vortex and twist phases' handedness significantly affects the evolution properties. When the twist phase's handedness is the same as that of the vortex phase, the beam profile maintains a dark hollow shape during propagation and the side rings in SDOC are suppressed; however, when the handedness of two phases is opposite, then the beam shape evolves into a Gaussian shape and the side rings in SDOC are enhanced. Furthermore, we obtain the analytical expression for the OAM of the TLGSM beam. It is found that the vortex phase's and twist phase's contributions to the OAM are interrelated, which greatly increases the amount of OAM. In addition, the OAM variation of the TLGSM beam passing through an anisotropic optical system is also explored in detail. Our results will be useful for information transfer and optical manipulations.