Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, known for its robustness to perturbations, serves as a reliable resource for optical communication and quantum information. This work presents an experimental investigation of OAM in self-healed vortex beams, along with analytical and numerical investigations under controlled spatial obstructions. We demonstrate that for a Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam of topological charge 1, the introduction of an obstruction (10%–35% clipping of the total intensity) breaks the beam’s symmetry, generating a measurable extrinsic OAM of up to 0.23 ℏ per photon, while the intrinsic OAM remains unchanged at 1 ℏ per photon. Such intrinsic and extrinsic components of the OAM are conserved upon propagation; therefore, they have potential for robust optical communication and quantum information processing.
Divakar et al. (Wed,) studied this question.