Review on partially coherent vortex beams

Ever since vortex beams were proposed, they are known for owning phase singularity and carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM). In the past decades, coherent optics developed rapidly. Vortex beams have been extended from fully coherent light to partially coherent light, from scalar light to vector light, from integral topological charge (TC) to fractional TC. Partially coherent vortex beams have attracted tremendous interest due to their hidden correlation singularity and unique propagation properties (e.g., beam shaping, beam rotation and self-reconstruction). Based on the sufficient condition for devising a genuine correlation function of partially coherent beam, partially coherent vortex beams with nonconventional correlation functions (i.e., non-Gaussian correlated Schell-model functions) were introduced recently. This timely review summarizes basic concepts, theoretical models, generation and propagation of partially coherent vortex beams.