Applications
Extrasolar planets have only recently been directly detected, as their parent star is so bright. Progress has been made in creating an optical vortex coronagraph to directly observe planets with too low a contrast ratio to their parent to be observed with other techniques.
Optical vortices are used in optical tweezers to manipulate micrometer-sized particles such as cells. Such particles can be rotated in orbits around the axis of the beam using OAM. Micro-motors have also been created using optical vortex tweezers.
Current computers use electrons which have two states, zero and one. Quantum computing could use light to encode and store information. Optical vortices theoretically have an infinite number of states, as there is no limit to the topological charge. This could allow for faster data manipulation. The cryptography community is also interested in optical vortices, as they can communicate using a higher bandwidth of information. However, that will need further developments in optical fibers, since existing optical fibers change the twist of optical vortices when bent or stressed.
Twisted radio beams could increase radio spectral efficiency by using the large number of vortical states,. There is experimental work on orbital angular momentum multiplexing in the optical domain.
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