Active sorting of orbital angular momentum states of light with cascaded tunable resonators

Abstract

Light carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) has been shown to be of use in a disparate range of fields ranging from astronomy to optical trapping, and as a promising new dimension for multiplexing signals in optical communications and data storage. A challenge to many of these applications is a reliable and dynamic method that sorts incident OAM states without altering them. Here we report a wavelength-independent technique capable of dynamically filtering individual OAM states based on the resonant transmission of a tunable optical cavity. The cavity length is piezo-controlled to facilitate dynamic reconfiguration, and the sorting process leaves both the transmitted and reflected signals in their original states for subsequent processing. As a result, we also show that a reconfigurable sorting network can be constructed by cascading such optical resonators to handle multiple OAM states simultaneously. This approach to sorting OAM states is amenable to integration into optical communication networks and has implications in quantum optics, astronomy, optical data storage and optical trapping.