Angular and radial mode analyzer for optical beams

We describe an approach to determining both the angular and the radial modal content of a scalar optical beam in terms of optical angular momentum modes. A modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer that incorporates a spatial rotator to determine the angular modes and an optical realization of the fractional Hankel transform (fHT) to determine the radial modes is analyzed. Varying the rotation angle and the order of the fHT produces a two-dimensional (2D) interferogram from which we extract the modal coefficients by simple 2D Fourier analysis. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America