Generalized spiral transformation for high-resolution sorting of vortex modes

Abstract

We propose a generalized spiral transformation scheme that is versatile to incorporate various types of spirals such as the Archimedean spiral and the Fermat spiral. Taking advantage of the equidistant feature, we choose the Archimedean spiral mapping and demonstrate its application in high-resolution orbital angular momentum mode sorting. Given a fixed minimum spiral width, the Archimedean spiral mapping shows superior performance over the logarithmic spiral mapping. This generalized transformation scheme may also find various applications in optical transformation and can be easily extended to other fields related to conformal mapping.