We report on an experiment in which orbital angular momentum of light is mapped at the single-photon level into and out of a cold atomic ensemble. Based on the dynamic electromagnetically-induced transparency protocol, the demonstrated optical memory enables the reversible mapping of Laguerre-gaussian modes with preserved handedness of the helical phase structure. The demonstrated capability opens the possibility to the storage of qubits encoded as superpositions of orbital angular momentum states and to multi-dimensional light-matter interfacing.
@article{arxiv.1212.2382,
title = {A reversible optical memory for twisted photons},
author = {L. Veissier and A. Nicolas and L. Giner and D. Maxein and A. S. Sheremet and E. Giacobino and J. Laurat},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.2382},
year = {2013}
}