English

Angular Momentum of a Photon and Phase Conjugation

Pattern Formation and Solitons 2015-05-13 v5 Soft Condensed Matter Fluid Dynamics Optics Quantum Physics

Abstract

Using the concept of an ideal phase-conjugating mirror we demonstrate that regardless of internal physical mechanism the phase-conjugation of a singular laser beam is accompanied by excitation within the mirror of internal waves which carry doubled angular momentum in order to match angular momentum conservation. For a Brillouin hypersound wavefront-reversal mirror this means that each elementary optical vortex belonging to a speckle pattern emits an acoustical vortex wave with doubled topological charge. The exact spatial profiles of light intensity and the intensity of hypersound in the vicinity of the phase singularity are obtained. These spiral profiles have a form of double helix which rotates with the frequency of sound. An optoacoustic experiment is proposed for visualization of the wavefront reversal of twisted optical beams and tunable twisted sound generation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0801.2675,
  title  = {Angular Momentum of a Photon and Phase Conjugation},
  author = {A. Yu. Okulov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.2675},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:03:50.068Z