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.
Bigelow
Matthew S
MS
The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
Zerom
Petros
P
Boyd
Robert W
RW