Detecting multiple optical vortices numerically

Abstract

We demonstrate a scheme to describe locations and relative polarities of optical vortices (OVs) in various beams. We base our technique on the characteristics of OVs: the OVs occur at the intersection of the zeroes of the extracted real and imaginary parts of the complex wave amplitude profile which can be obtained via numerical simulation. We detect the OVs in various generated beams such as Laguerre-Gauss beam, Gaussian beam with localized OVs, and Helico-conical optical beams.