Misalignment measurement of optical vortex beam in free space

The misalignment of optical vortex (OV) beams, including transversal displacement and tilt, occurs in many situations, including on reflection or refraction at an interface between two different media and in propagation and tracking systems for optical communications. We propose a reliable method to determine and subsequently eliminate tilt and transversal displacement in an OV beam. An experimental setup was established to verify the proposed method, and the experimental results showed good agreement with those of the numerical simulations. Using the measured misalignments, the initial orbital angular momentum spectrum can be recovered in free space.