Vortex Beams: Fundamentals and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

It is well known that vortices are inherent to any wave phenomena, and in general, vortex beams denote optical vortex beam. The vortex beams have become one of the most important light sources today, due to each photon of vortex beams can carry ℓħ orbital angular momentum (OAM), where ℓ known as the topological charge and ħ denoting the reduced Plank constant. Thus far, vortex beams have found a wide variety of applications, for example, classical optical communications and quantum communications, optical manipulation, optical metrology  and imaging, to mention but a few. Besides optical vortex beams, some other vortices, such as  electron vortex beams, neutron atom vortex beams, plasmonic vortices and radio vortices, can carry OAM as well, and may lead to a new wide-range of applications in many fields.

Over the past three decades, significant fundamental studies on vortex beams have been carried out, from paraxial model to non-paraxial model, from scalar beams to vectorial beams. Dynamical characteristics of polarization singularities, coherence singularities, and speckle fields have been extensively studied as well. Meanwhile, different approaches and technologies have been proposed to generate vortex beams and measuring its OAM.  Consequently, with the advance of optical vortex beams, the rapid development of optical technologies, such as optical manipulation, optically driven motors, data processing, imaging, optical sorting, delivering, etc., have been achieved.

This Special Issue aims at presenting state-of-the-art articles on both the theoretical and experimental studies on generation, propagation and measurement of vortex beams, and applications of vortex beams. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Vortex Dynamics
• Partially coherent vortex beams
• Fractional vortex beam
• Plasmonics vortices
• Vector vortex beams
• Orbital angular momentum
• Applications of vortex beams

Prof. Dr. Yangjian Cai
Prof. Dr. Yuanjie Yang
Guest Editors

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