Optical vortex phase-shifting digital holography

We report a new optical vortex phase-shifting method for digital holography, in which an optical vortex mode is taken as the reference beam for holographic recording, and the required phase shifts are directly generated by rotating the vortex mode. In digital reconstruction, the complex amplitude of the object wave can be retrieved by use of the conventional phase shifting algorithm on condition that the digital illumination beam is replaced by an vortex beam with the same topological charge as the reference used. Both the theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.