Breakup of ring beams carrying orbital angular momentum in sodium vapor.
We have observed filamentation due to azimuthal modulational instabilities in spinning ring solitons with orbital angular momentum m variant Planck's over 2pi in sodium vapor. We show experimentally that vortex beams with m values of 1, 2, and 3 tend to break into two, four, and six filaments, respectively. Treating the sodium vapor as a Doppler broadened two-level atomic system, we find that we can accurately model the propagation and breakup of these beams with numerical simulations.
The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
Matthew S
MS
Bigelow
Petros
P
Zerom
Robert W
RW
Boyd