Generation and application of optical vortices with arbitrary topological charges

Optical vortex(OV) has been researched and applied in various front fields. Here, a novel method, by combining vortex retarders and half waveplates, was proposed to generate OVs with arbitrary topological charges. As the optical transmissivity of the waveplates were high, the energy efficiency of OV with topological charge of 3 was still higher than 93% in experiments. Further, the interference method was employed to detect topological charges of the generated OVs, by the direction and number of forks in the fork like pattern. As last, surface plasmon polariton (SPP) field was excited by highly focused OV with topological charge of 3, and gold particles were attracted and manipulated in the plasmonic vortex field. The results demonstrate significance of such method, and it will express enormous potential in various applications.