Direct measurement of the skew angle of the Poynting vector in a helically phased beam

We measure the local skew angle of the Poynting vector within a helically-phased, exp(il phi), beam using a Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor. It is the skew angle of the Poynting vector with respect to the beam axis that gives rise to the orbital angular momentum of a light beam. We confirm that this skew angle is l/kr, corresponding to an orbital angular momentum of lh per photon. Measurement of orbital angular momentum in this way is an alternative to interferometric techniques giving a non-ambiguous result to both the magnitude and sign of l from a single measurement, without any restriction on the optical bandwidth. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America