Hyperspectral optical orbital angular momentum modulation from tunable structured waveplates

Abstract

Shaping the orbital angular momentum of optical pulses in the spectral domain is a means of managing light in space and time that offers many possible applications. However, these are limited by the small number of techniques available, whose flexibility does not yet rival that of the continuous regime. We propose here to implement a tunable hyperspectral management of the orbital angular momentum of a polychromatic light field. The main idea is to exploit the dispersive nature of geometric phase optical elements by intentionally choosing to work in a regime of high anisotropic optical retardance. An experimental proof of principle is demonstrated in the visible range using a supercontinuum laser and an optically thick, electrically controllable, liquid crystal structured wave plate.