Far field diffraction of an optical vortex beam by a fork-shaped grating

In this work we report experimental data confirming the analytically predicted transformation of the topological charge (TC) of an input optical vortex (OV) beam, generated by means of fork-shaped binary computer-generated hologram (CGH), after a second fork-shaped binary CGH. The final TC of the vortex is confirmed to be equal to the TC of the incident beam plus the diffraction order (with its sign) times the TC encoded in the binary grating. The radii of the transformed OVs in the far field also are found to agree fairly well with these predicted by the analytical theory.