The Orbital Angular Momentum of Light: An Introduction

摘要: Most physicists know that polarized light is associated with the spin angular momentum of the photon. The use of the flow of angular momentum flux across a surface, rather than angular momentum density, allows the separation of the spin and orbital angular momentum parts in a gauge invariant way. Simple comparisons of the behavior of spin and orbital angular momenta in different situations prove to be a fruitful way to demonstrate their properties. For spin angular momentum and circularly polarized light, the light source need …