A Review of Tunable Orbital Angular Momentum Modes in Fiber: Principle and Generation

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams, a new fundamental degree of freedom, have excited a great diversity of interest due to a variety of emerging applications. The scalability of OAM has always been a topic of discussion because it plays an important role in many applications, such as expanding to large capacity and adjusting the trapped particle rotation speed. Thus, the generation of arbitrary tunable OAM mode has been paid increasing attention. In this paper, the basic concepts of classical OAM modes are introduced firstly. Then, the tunable OAM modes are categorized into three types according to the orbital angular momentums and polarization states of mode carrying. In order to understand the OAM evolution of a mode intuitively, three kinds of Poincaré spheres (PSs) are introduced to represent the three kinds of tunable OAM modes. Numerous methods generating tunable OAM modes can be roughly divided into two types: spatial and fiber-based generation methods. The principles of fiber-based generation methods are interpreted by introducing two mode bases (linearly-polarized modes and vector modes) of the fiber. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of each generation method are pointed out and the key challenges for tunable OAM modes are discussed.