English

Orbital angular momentum from marginals of quadrature distributions

Quantum Physics 2013-12-20 v1

Abstract

We set forth a method to analyze the orbital angular momentum of a light field. Instead of using the canonical formalism for the conjugate pair angle-angular momentum, we model this latter variable by the superposition of two independent harmonic oscillators along two orthogonal axes. By describing each oscillator by a standard Wigner function, we derive, via a consistent change of variables, a comprehensive picture of the orbital angular momentum. We compare with previous approaches and show how this method works in some relevant examples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1312.5433,
  title  = {Orbital angular momentum from marginals of quadrature distributions},
  author = {L. L. Sanchez-Soto and A. B. Klimov and P. de la Hoz and I. Rigas and J. Rehacek and Z. Hradil and G. Leuchs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.5433},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2 color figures