涡旋光束的产生与应用是当前光学领域的研究热点. 利用傅里叶级数展开法分析了四台阶相位板的相位结构, 发现四台阶相位板可看作是由一系列不同拓扑荷数的螺旋相位板所组成, 用线偏振光直接照射相位板时,将产生多级衍射光波,各级衍射光均为不同拓扑荷数的涡旋光波,由于多级衍射光波间的干涉导致光强分布偏离轴对称分布, 因而与涡旋光波有一定差距. 在此基础上, 提出了用四台阶相位板产生涡旋光束的新方案,借助于Mach-Zehnder干涉仪光路,两块四台阶相位板产生的衍射光干涉叠加,通过调节干涉仪光路的相位差, 使一部分衍射级干涉相消, 另一部分衍射级干涉相长, 相互加强, 从而把线偏振光转换为涡旋光束. 数值模拟计算了几种周期数不同的四台阶相位板衍射光强和角动量分布, 并与螺旋相位板进行比较, 证明用简单的四台阶相位板不仅能够获得与用螺旋相位板相同的涡旋光束,而且可以用周期数较小的四台阶相位板产生具有大拓扑荷数的涡旋光束,降低了制作相位板的难度.%The generation and application of the vortex beams are part of the hot topics in the optical field. In this paper, the phase structure of the four-step phase plates, analyzed by Fourier series expansion method, is composed of a series of spiral phase plates. When the phase plate is directly irradiated by linearly polarized light, multi-order diffraction waves with different topological charge numbers are generated. Unlike vortex waves, the intensity distribution of the multi-order diffraction has a deviation from the axial symmetry due to the interference with each other. On this basis, a new scheme is proposed to generate vortex beams by the four-step phase plates. With the help of Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the diffraction waves generated by two pieces of the four-step phase plates overlap each other. By adjusting the phase difference of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, some orders of diffraction waves generate destructive interference while the others generate constructive interference. Thus the linear polarized light can be converted into vortex beams. The diffraction intensity and angular momentum distributions of the four-step phase plates with different cycle numbers are numerically simulated and compared with the spiral phase plates, we can provethat the vortex beams can be obtained by simple four-step phase plates which are the same as those obtained by spiral phase plates. In addition, the four-step phase plates with a small cycle number can generate vortex beams with a large topological charge number and the fabrication diffculty of the phase plates is reduced.
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