Analysis and improvement of Laguerre-Gaussian beam position estimation using quadrant detectors

Laguerre-Gaussian beams have become increasingly important in areas like optical manipulation and quantum communications. A good understanding of the accuracy and sensitivity of their displacement measurements are required for these applications. In this Letter, we present a method to analyze and compare the performance of these measurements, and an estimation technique is proposed to improve their measurement accuracies. The effectiveness of our methods is verified by simulation studies. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America