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Updated: Aug 21, 2026

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Intrinsic orbital angular momentum of paraxial beams with off-axis imprinted vortices
S S R Oemrawsingh1, E R Eliel, G Nienhuis
1Huygens Laboratory, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9504, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. soemraws@molphys.leidenuniv.nl
Abstract:
We investigate the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of paraxial beams containing off-axis phase dislocations and put forward a simple method to calculate the intrinsic orbital angular momentum of an arbitrary paraxial beam. Using this approach we find that the intrinsic OAM of a fundamental Gaussian beam with a vortex imprinted off axis has a Gaussian dependence on the vortex displacement, implying that the expectation value of the intrinsic OAM of a photon can take on a continuous range of values (i.e., integer and noninteger values in units of h). Finally, we investigate, both numerically and experimentally, the far-field profiles of beams carrying half-integer OAM per photon, these beams having been created by the method of imprinting off-axis vortices.
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