Spiral phase plates with radial discontinuities for the generation of multiring orbital angular momentum beams: Fabrication, characterization, and application

A design of spiral phase plates for the generation of multiring beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) is presented. Besides the usual helical profile, these phase plates present radial ?-discontinuities in correspondence of the zeros of the associated Laguerre polynomials. Samples were fabricated by electron beam lithography over glass substrates coated with a polymethylmethacrylate resist layer. The optical response was analyzed and the purity of the generated beams was investigated in terms of Laguerre-Gaussian modes contributions. The far-field intensity pattern was compared with theoretical models and numerical simulations, while the expected phase features were confirmed by interferometric analysis with a Mach-Zehnder setup. The high quality of the output beams confirms the applicability of these phase plates for the generation of high-order OAM beams with nonzero radial index. An application consisting of the design of computer-generated holograms encoding information for light beams carrying phase singularities is presented and described. A numerical code based on an iterative Fourier transform algorithm has been developed for the computation of phase-only diffractive optical element for illumination under OAM beams. Numerical analysis and preliminary experimental results confirm the applicability of these devices as high-security optical elements for anticounterfeiting applications.