Proposed phase plate for superimposed orbital angular momentum state generation

In this letter, a quadratic phase plate (QPP) whose thickness increases quadratically with azimuthal angle phi is proposed. When a beam with initial topological charge m (m could be an arbitrary integer) is passed through the plate, quadratic phase modulation can be expected to expand the initial single orbital angular momentum (OAM) mode to a superimposed OAM state. The obtained multi-OAM state exhibits a comb-like OAM spectrum, which shows a flat region. The power variation of the OAM modes within the flat region is less than 3 dB, while the power for the OAM modes with charge numbers out of the flat region decays rapidly. Moreover, the number of OAM modes within the flat region can reach dozens. This may have potential applications in the field of communication, quantum information and optical manipulation, etc. (c) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement