Vortex Beams

This entry hasn't been fully written up on the original site yet — here's a short overview of my master's thesis topic instead.

Optical vortex beams are beams of light with a helical, corkscrew-shaped wavefront. At the center of such a beam sits a characteristic dark spot — a phase singularity where the intensity drops to zero.

Orbital angular momentum

The twisted wavefront gives the light a quantized orbital angular momentum (OAM). This angular momentum is, in principle, unbounded, which makes vortex beams interesting for both fundamental research and applications.

Why THz vortex beams?

For my master's thesis, I worked on generating vortex beams in the terahertz range and measuring them interferometrically — in particular, on how to reliably determine such a beam's topological charge.

More on this in the related publication and talk on the topic.