Wang Haiyun, Peng Xiaofeng, Zhang Hao, Liu Lin, Chen Yahong, Wang Fei, Cai Yangjian
School of Physical Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China.
School of Physics and Electronics, Shandong Provincial Engineering and Technical Center of Light Manipulations & Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optics and Photonic Devices, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250014, China.
Nanophotonics. 2021 Sep 29;11(4):689-696. doi: 10.1515/nanoph-2021-0432. eCollection 2022 Jan.
Twist phase is a nontrivial second-order phase that only exists in a partially coherent beam. Such twist phase endows the partially coherent beam with orbital angular momentum (OAM) and has unique applications such as in super-resolution imaging. However, the manipulation and the detection of the twist phase are still far from easy tasks in experiment. In this work, we present a flexible approach to generate a famous class of twisted Gaussian Schell-model (TGSM) beam with controllable twist phase by the superposition of the complex field realizations using a single phase-only spatial light modulator. The precise control of the amplitude and phase of the field realizations allows one to manipulate the strength of the twist phase easily. In addition, we show that the twist factor, a key factor that determines the strength of twist phase and the amount of OAM, can be measured by extracting the real part of the complex degree of coherence of the TGSM beam. The experiment is carried out with the help of the generalized Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment as the generated TGSM beam obeys Gaussian statistics. The flexible control and detection of the twist phase are expected to find applications in coherence and OAM-based ghost imaging.
