Efficient separation of the orbital angular momentum eigenstates of light

Understand

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light is an attractive degree of freedom for funda- mentals studies in quantum mechanics.

• In addition, the discrete unbounded state-space of OAM has been used to enhance classical and quantum communications.
• Unambiguous mea- surement of OAM is a key part of all such experiments.
• However, state-of-the-art methods for separating single photons carrying a large number of different OAM values are limited to a theoretical separation efficiency of about 77 percent.