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Structured Light and Its Applications
book

Structured Light and Its Applications

by David L. Andrews
April 2008
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
10h 57m
English
Academic Press
Content preview from Structured Light and Its Applications

Chapter 2 Angular Momentum and Vortices in Optics

Gerard Nienhuis

Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands

In this chapter, we will review the concept of angular momentum of the classical and the quantum radiation field. We will discuss the separation in an orbital part and a spin part, both for an arbitrary field and for a light beam in the paraxial limit. We will also cover the properties of the corresponding quantum operators. Light fields where the density of angular momentum is simply related to the energy (or photon) density are of special interest. Such states tend to contain vortices in the form of phase singularities. Examples are spherical and cylindrical multipole fields, which are exact solutions of Maxwell’s equations. Laguerre–Gaussian ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780123740274