Vortex position detection using a scanning triangular aperture in a digital micromirror device

Abstract Optical vortices, as solutions to the wave equation, remain stable under ideal theoretical conditions. However, in experiments where beams produced with holograms and spatial light modulators introduce perturbations, their phase structures can be disrupted, leading to instability. Specifically, higher-order optical vortices (with topological charge | ℓ | > 1 ) are inherently unstable in that they tend to separate in a series of optical vortices with unit topological charge ( | ℓ | = 1 ) even with small perturbations. In this work, we demonstrate a technique to detect the positions of optical vortices using a scanning triangular aperture in a digital micromirror device and a digital pinhole. We observe the diffraction patterns of a vortex through the triangular aperture, and we show that we can determine the center of an optical vortex (OV) by measuring the intensity at the center of a pattern using a digital pinhole. We investigate the changes in the measured signal for different triangular apertures and pinhole sizes. We observe that while smaller pinholes lead to a decrease in light intensity, the detected position of a single OV with unit topological charge is similar for all pinhole sizes. We also find that the triangular aperture size becomes important when locating vortex pairs. Using a triangular aperture with a radius R = 0.52 mm, we can resolve OV pairs at least 86.4 μ m apart in our experiments. Our methods help pave the way to understanding the fundamental behavior of multiple vortex interactions in optical beams and also can be used when determining the position of an OV in metrology.