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PHOTON CORRELATION SPECTROSCOPY USING OPTICAL VORTEX

Ashok Kumar, Jitendra Bhatt, R. P. Singh Theoretical Physics Division, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, Gujarat 380009, India ashokk@prl.res.in, jitendra@prl.res.in, rpsingh@prl.res.in
Abstract: Optical vortex, a phase singularity in light field, is passed through the rotating ground glass (RGG) and its intensity autocorrelation curve is compared with that of a plane laser beam passing through RGG. We observe that the intensity autocorrelation curves for optical vortex decrease much faster than that of a plane laser beam. 1. INTRODUCTION Optical vortices are the phase singularities in the optical field. At the point of singularity the real as well as the imaginary part of the field becomes zero and phase becomes undefined. An optical vortex is recognized as a dark point in the bright beam. The peculiar thing about an optical vortex is that the beam has a helical wavefront and photons in such a beam can have orbital angular momentum as well as spin angular momentum. They are often encountered in nature such as on scattering of laser light through rough surfaces however, they can be generated in a controlled manner as well [1]. The electric field of an optical vortex of order m, centered at the origin and nested in a Gaussian beam can be written as E(x,y) = E0 (x+iy)m exp[-(x2 + y2)/ 2] (1) where is the size of the Gaussian beam at a fixed plane normal to the beam. In cylindrical coordinate it becomes E(r,) = E0rm exp(im) exp(-r2/2) (2) where r2 = (x2 + y2), = tan-1(y/x). The photon correlation spectroscopy, originated from the landmark experiment of Hanbury-Brown and Twiss [2] deals with the second order coherence or intensity correlation. We did intensity correlation experiment for a randomized optical vortex as well as a randomized plane laser beam. 2. EXPERIMENT Our experimental set-up (Fig. 1) consists of an intensity stabilized red He-Ne laser source (SpectraPhysics, 117A). Computer generated hologram (CGH) is used to generate an optical vortex (OV). The laser beam passing through the branch point of CGH gives different orders of vortices in the diffraction. A photomultiplier tube (PMT) from Hamamatsu (R6358P) is used for photon counting and a digital correlator (DC) from PhotoCor instruments is used for measuring intensity autocorrelation curves. First we did the photon correlation experiment using a plane laser beam in TEM00 mode passing through a RGG and obtained intensity autocorrelation curve shown in Fig. 2a. Next we select an optical vortex of order 1 by aperture A and let it pass through the RGG, keeping all the experimental conditions same. We see that the intensity autocorrelation curves for a randomized OV (Fig. 2b) decreases much faster than that of a randomized plane laser beam. We attribute it to complex phase structure of OV that loses coherence much faster that that of a plane laser beam. 3. FIGURES

Fig. 1: Experimental setup


Intensity Autocorrelation Intensity Autocorrelation
0 50 100 150 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 Channel No./Time

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0 50 100 150 Channel No./Time

(a) (b) Fig. 2: Intensity autocorrelation curves for a laser (a) and for an optical vortex (b), both passed through RGG and 1channel corresponds to 20 ns. REFERENCES [1] N. R. Heckenberg, R. McDuff, C. P. Smith and A.G. White. Genaration of optical phase singularities by computer generated holograms, Opt. Lett. 17, 221, (1992) [2] R. H. Brown and R. Q. Twiss, Correlation between Photons in Two Coherent Beams of Light, Nature, 177, 27 (1956)

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