Spin and orbital angular momentum and their conversion in cylindrical vector vortices

Abstract

The generation of light beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) has been greatly advanced with the emergence of the recently reported integrated optical vortex emitters. Generally, optical vortices emitted by these devices possess cylindrically symmetric states of polarization and spiral phase fronts, and they can be defined as cylindrical vector vortices (CVVs). Using the radiation of angularly arranged dipoles to model the CVVs, these beams as hybrid modes of two circularly polarized scalar vortices are theoretically demonstrated to own well-defined total angular momentum. Moreover, the effect of spin-orbit interactions of angular momentum is identified in the CVVs when the size of the emitting structure varies. This effect results in the diminishing spin component of angular momentum and purer OAM states at large structure radii.