Mohammad Mirhosseini, Mehul Malik, Zhimin Shi, Robert W. Boyd
The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light is an attractive degree of freedom for fundamentals studies in quantum mechanics. In addition, the discrete unbounded state-space provided by OAM has been used to enhance classical and quantum communications. The ability to unambiguously measure the OAM of single photons is a key part of all such experiments. However, state-of-the-art methods for sorting OAM modes are limited to a separation efficiency of about 80 percent. Here we demonstrate a method which uses a series of complex optical transformations to enable the measurement of light's OAM with a separation efficiency of more than 92 percent. Further, we demonstrate the separation of modes in the angular position basis, which is mutually unbiased with respect to the OAM basis. The high degree of certainty makes our approach particularly attractive for quantum key distribution systems employing spatial encoding.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0849
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