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Recovering the vorticity of a light beam after scattering

Article  in  Applied Physics Letters · July 2015

DOI: 10.1063/1.4926913

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 Recovering the vorticity of a light beam after scattering
Gangi Reddy Salla, Chithrabhanu Perumangattu, Shashi Prabhakar, Ali Anwar, and Ravindra P. Singh

Citation: Applied Physics Letters 107, 021104 (2015); doi: 10.1063/1.4926913

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 APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS 107, 021104 (2015)

Recovering the vorticity of a light beam after scattering

Gangi Reddy Salla,1,a) Chithrabhanu Perumangattu,1 Shashi Prabhakar,1,2 Ali Anwar,1
and Ravindra P. Singh3
1
Physical Research Laboratory, Navarangpura, Ahmedabad -380009, India
2
IIT Gandhinagar, Chandkheda, Ahmedabad 382424, India
3
Physical Research Laboratory, Navarangpura, Ahmedabad 380009, India
(Received 28 April 2015; accepted 6 July 2015; published online 15 July 2015)
We generate optical vortices and scatter them through a rough surface. However, the scattered light
passing through a lens shows the same vorticity when probed at the Fourier plane. The vorticity is
measured using a nonseparable state of polarization and orbital angular momentum of light as it
cannot be confirmed by the standard interferometric technique. The observed vorticity is found to
be independent of the amount of scattered light collected. Therefore, vortices can be used as
information carriers even in the presence of scattering media. The experimental results are well
C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.
supported by the theoretical results. V
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4926913]

Optical vortices are the twisted light beams recognized separability of polarization and OAM in a light beam that can
by their helical wave fronts due to azimuthal phase variation be created by the superposition of two vortices having oppo-
around the point of darkness.1,2 They carry an orbital angular site topological charges but orthogonal polarizations.23
momentum (OAM) of mh per photon where m is order of the We start our experiments with the scattering of a vortex
vortex defined as the number of twisted wave fronts over one beam and vortex-vortex interferometry for both the coherent
wave length.3–5 The spin angular momentum of light is and the collimated scattered optical vortex beams in a Mach-
related to polarization that has two dimensional basis whereas Zehnder interferometer. First, we scatter a vortex beam em-
the OAM is related to the spatial mode and forms an infinite bedded in a host Gaussian beam of width w0 ¼ 1.92 mm
dimensional basis. This kind of multi-dimensionality offers a through a GGP and collimate the scattered light using a lens
realization of d-dimensional qudits that increases the channel combination as shown in Fig. 1. Figure 2 shows the intensity
capacity in quantum communication.6 In the case of classical distributions of a scattered optical vortex of order 2 at differ-
communication once again, the number of spatial modes ent positions from the scattering plane, i.e., after the GGP,
available has been utilized to enhance the data capacity in immediately after the lens placed at a distance from the GGP,
fibers.7,8 They have also been used for free space communi- and at the Fourier plane, respectively, for zero and non-zero
cation.9,10 However, for communication, it is desirable to speeds of the GGP. It can be seen that there is no trace of the
encode the information in a variable whose value remains vortex beam after the GGP as well as immediately after the
unaffected by the scattering. Therefore, the effect of scatter- lens as the phase of the beam gets completely randomized.
ing on coherence for single-photon communication using or- The speckles got averaged out at the non-zero speed of the
bital angular momentum states has been investigated GGP and give flat intensity distribution. However, when
theoretically11 along with their propagation through a
probed at the Fourier plane, we see a ring shaped beam.
Kolmogorov type atmospheric turbulence.12
The collimated scattered beam interferes with itself and
Recently, the spatial and temporal coherence properties
produces a fringe pattern when phases are matched from
of scattered optical vortices have been studied in detail.13–18
speckle to speckle. Then, the GGP is removed to observe the
A study of vortex beam passing through an iris diaphragm
fringes for a coherent vortex beam. The corresponding inter-
shows that the vorticity of light does not change even after
ference fringes for both, coherent and scattered vortex beams
diffraction.19 It has been shown that the decay of temporal
have been shown in Fig. 3 for the orders of 0–3. One needs
correlation is sharper with the increase in order of the vorti-
ces after scattering through a ground glass plate (GGP).13,14 to match every speckle with its copy present in another arm
The formation of ring shaped beams in the scattered optical of the interferometer to get the macroscopic fringes with
vortices has also been reported and observed.15,20 scattered light. It is clear from the figure that there is a vast
In this letter, we show experimentally as well as theoreti- similarity in interferograms of coherent and scattered light
cally that this ring shaped beam has same vorticity as the inci- beams. In both the cases, the number of fringes with discon-
dent optical vortex.21 To confirm their vorticity, we use the tinuity is equal to the order of the vortex. However, one can-
properties of non-separable state of light along with interfer- not confirm the vorticity with these results as the fringe
ometry. The non-separable state of light for different degrees separation and shape change rapidly with a small spatial shift
of freedom or the non-quantum entanglement has already between the two beams of the interferometer. In the case of
been proposed and demonstrated.22,23 We consider the non- coherent beam, the fringe pattern changes to oppositely ori-
ented fork fringes, a characteristic of vortex-vortex interfer-
ometry while for the collimated scattered light it completely
a)
[email protected] disappears due to mismatch from speckle to speckle.

0003-6951/2015/107(2)/021104/5/$30.00 107, 021104-1 C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC

V

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 021104-2 Salla et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 021104 (2015)

FIG. 1. The experimental set up for

scattering the vortex beam and to
observe the vortex-vortex interference
fringes. M1–M4—Mirrors, VL—Vortex
lens used to convert the Gaussian to vor-
tex beam, BS—Beam splitter, L1 and
L2—Plano-convex lenses, and GGP—
Ground glass plate.

FIG. 2. The intensity distributions of a

scattered optical vortex of order 2 after
the GGP (left), immediately after the
lens (middle) and the Fourier plane
(right) correspond to different speeds
of the GGP (top) 0 cm/s (bottom)
97.35 rad/s.

FIG. 3. Experimentally obtained inter-

ference fringes for both coherent (top)
and scattered (bottom) optical vortex
beams of order m ¼ 0–3 (from left to
right).

Therefore, we look for an alternative method that uses the vortices. These LG modes, which are OAM states of light can
properties of a non-separable state of polarization and OAM be represented on a OAM Poincare sphere.24,25 All points on
to find the azimuthal phase structure in the scattered optical this Poincare sphere can be realized by projecting the above
vortices. non-separable beam to corresponding polarizations. The pro-
Before we go for the experimental results, let us jection to horizontal (vertical) polarization gives an optical
describe briefly the non-separable state of light. A classical vortex of order m (m) while to diagonal and anti-diagonal
light beam with a non-separable state of polarization and polarizations will give the superposition of two vortices with
OAM22,23 can be represented as the same order but opposite in sign, and can be written as
Eðx; yÞ ¼ e^x LGm ^y LGm
0 ðx; yÞ þ e 0 ðx; yÞ; (1) e x þ e^y ÞðLGm
ED ðx; yÞ ¼ ð^ m
0 ðx; yÞ þ LG0 ðx; yÞÞ; (2)
m
where e^x and e^y are horizontal and vertical polarization states e x  e^y ÞðLGm
EA ðx; yÞ ¼ ð^ 0 ðx; yÞ  LG0 ðx; yÞÞ: (3)
of light. LG6m
0 ðx; yÞ, Laguerre-Gaussian modes with azi-
muthal index m and radial index 0 correspond to the field dis- This superposition of states contains the characteristic
tributions of two equal and oppositely charged optical of azimuthal phase in their intensity distribution with 2 m
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 021104-3 Salla et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 021104 (2015)

FIG. 4. The theoretical intensity distri-

butions of a nonseparable state of
polarization and OAM for the different
projections—Horizontal (column1),
vertical (column2), anti–diagonal (col-
umn3), and diagonal (column4) of
m ¼ 2 (top), 3 (bottom).

number of petals for the vortex of order m. We follow the This beam is scattered through a ground glass plate rotating
same logic in our experiment. We scatter a non-separable at a constant speed of 97.35 rad/s. The constant rotation of
state through the GGP and collect part of the light with a GGP helps in averaging out the speckles and reduces the
plano-convex lens. We get two speckle patterns correspond- noise while imaging them.27,28 The scattered light consists of
ing to two vortices having orthogonal polarizations which two orthogonally polarized speckle patterns corresponding to
generate dark cores in the Fourier plane. If these partially the two oppositely charged vortices. It is focused with a
coherent beams with dark core have azimuthal phase, their plano-convex lens (L) of focal length 20 cm. Before record-
superposition must give the petals. These petals help us in ing the far field intensity distributions with a CCD camera,
measuring the order of scattered vortex that is half of the we have used a polarizer P to project the output state in dif-
number of petals. The theoretical intensity distributions cor- ferent polarizations. The lens is placed at a distance of 22 cm
responding to the different polarizations of a non-separable from the GGP, and the position of the camera has been
state have been given in Fig. 4. The experimental set up and adjusted to get the geometrical focus. One should note that
the corresponding results have been explained below. the geometrical focus of the lens shifts towards the lens with
Our experimental setup for the observation of vorticity decrease in the amount of light collected.15,29 We have col-
in scattered optical vortices is shown in Fig. 5. We have used lected the scattered light with a lens of aperture 2.5 cm to
a diode pumped solid state laser (Verdi 10) of wavelength observe the intensity distribution at the Fourier plane.
532 nm. The light beam passes through a half wave plate Figure 6 shows the experimentally observed far field
whose fast axis is oriented at 22.5 that converts the polariza- intensity distributions of the projections in different polariza-
tion from vertical to diagonal. Then it passes through a modi- tions for a light beam obtained by the scattering of a non-
fied polarizing Sagnac interferometer26 containing vortex separable beam with vortices of orders 2 (top) and 3 (bottom).
lens of order m ¼ 1, 2, and 3. The beam coming out of the in- Since the two orthogonally polarized speckle patterns never
terferometer is a non-separable state of the polarization and interfere, the far field intensity distribution of the scattered
the spatial mode or the OAM. This kind of non-separability non-separable beam is similar to an optical vortex beam. If we
is also called non-quantum hybrid entanglement.22,23 The project on horizontal (vertical) polarization, it looks like a vor-
obtained non-separable state is the superposition of two vor- tex beam of order m(m) (first and second columns). While
tices, whose orders are same in magnitude and opposite in projection to any arbitrary polarization results into conversion
sign with polarizations orthogonal to each other (Eq. (1)). of two orthogonal polarization states to non-orthogonal and
the two vortices start interfering with each other, this interfer-
ence gives the petal structures in the far field intensity distri-
butions (third and fourth columns). The petal structures are
very clear and look similar to the theoretical intensity distribu-
tions for coherent beams shown in Fig. 4. These petals con-
firm the presence of azimuthal phase in the scattered beam.
For theoretical analysis, we start with the electric field
of an optical vortex of azimuthal index m embedded in a
host Gaussian beam of width w0
2 þy2
x
w2
Eðx; yÞ ¼ ðx þ iyÞm e 0 : (4)

The ground glass plate introduces a d-correlated

Gaussian random function to the beam passing through it.
FIG. 5. The experimental set up for observing the vorticity in scattered opti-
This can be achieved numerically by taking the convolution
cal vortex. M1–M4—Mirrors, HWP—Half wave plate, PBS—Polarizing
beam splitter, VL—Vortex lens, i/p state—Non–separable state, GGP— between a 2D spatial random function Rand(x, y) and a
Ground glass plate, P—Polarizer, and L—Plano convex lens. Gaussian correlation function C(x, y)27,28
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 021104-4 Salla et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 021104 (2015)

FIG. 6. Experimentally obtained far

field intensity distributions for differ-
ent projections in polarization after
scattering through a ground glass plate.
These results correspond to the non-
separable states with m ¼ 2 (top), 3
(bottom) for w0 ¼ 1.92 mm.

/ðx; yÞ ¼ Cðx; yÞ  Randðx; yÞ; (5) E0 ðx; yÞ ¼ Eðx; yÞei/ðx;yÞ ; (7)

where * represents the 2D convolution between the two where /ðx; yÞ is random phase introduced by the GGP to the
functions. The Gaussian correlation function is defined as vortex. The results have been simulated using this random
phase distribution.
2
þðy1 y2 Þ2 =r2 Þ
Cðx; yÞ ¼ eððx1 x2 Þ ; (6) Figure 7 shows the far field intensity distributions for
the superposition of two scattered equal and oppositely
where r is the correlation width. Now, the electric field of an charged vortices with m ¼ 2 and 3 corresponding to the pro-
optical vortex after scattering through a GGP plate is given jections on different polarization states. The constant rotation
by30 of the GGP has been taken into account by the incoherent

FIG. 7. The theoretical far field inten-

sity distributions that correspond to the
images shown in Fig. 6.

FIG. 8. The experimental (top) and

simulated (bottom) far field intensity
distributions for the projection on diag-
onal polarization of a scattered non-
separable light beam of m ¼ 2 at differ-
ent speeds of the GGP given at top of
the figure.

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 021104-5 Salla et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 021104 (2015)

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