Demonstration of vortex-induced beam shaping in seeded second-harmonic generation

We report the experimental demonstration of a method that allows the simultaneous frequency-doubling and the shaping of a light beam into a variety of patterns. The technique is based on the controllable generation of multiple-vortex patterns in seeded schemes. Our observations were performed under conditions of second-harmonic generation pumped by picosecond pulses at 1055 nm, but the scheme can be extended to all parametric processes.