Measuring the OAM spectrum of a fractional helical beam in a single shot

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a new technique, to our knowledge, to precisely measure the orbital angular momentum (OAM) spectrum of the fractional helical beam in a single shot. This is realized using a single-path interferometer scheme combined with space division multiplexing and polarization phase-shifting. Such a combination enables the single-shot recording of multiple phase-shifted interferograms, which leads to extracting the phase profile of the incident fractional helical beam. Furthermore, by adopting an orthogonal projection method, this measured phase is utilized to evaluate the corresponding OAM spectrum. To test the efficacy, a set of simulations and experiments for different fractional helical beams is demonstrated. The proposed method shows enormous potential to characterize the OAM spectrum in real time.