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Updated: Apr 2, 2026

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Intrinsic and extrinsic orbital angular momentum of a self-healed optical vortex
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The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, known for its robustness to perturbations, serves as a reliable resource for optical communication and quantum information. This work presents an experimental investigation of OAM in self-healed vortex beams, along with analytical and numerical investigations under controlled spatial obstructions. We demonstrate that for a Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam of topological charge 1, the introduction of an obstruction (10%-35% clipping of the total intensity) breaks the beam's symmetry, generating a measurable extrinsic OAM of up to 0.23ℏ per photon, while the intrinsic OAM remains unchanged at 1ℏ per photon. Such intrinsic and extrinsic components of the OAM are conserved upon propagation; therefore, they have potential for robust optical communication and quantum information processing.
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