Generation of light carrying orbital angular momentum via induced coherence grating in cold atoms

We report on the generation of light carrying orbital angular momentum through Bragg diffraction into an electromagnetically induced coherence grating in a degenerate two-level system of cold cesium atoms. The induced Zeeman coherence grating is shown to contain the spatial phase structure of the incident beams. The exchange of phase information between a light beam with orbital angular momentum and a long-lived atomic coherence opens up the way to process quantum information encoded in a multidimensional state space.