Transmission of optical vortex beam in Xe plasma

We study the optical vortex beam transmission in Xenon (Xe) plasma environment. The interaction of the vortex beam with the Xe lamp results in a reduction in vortex beam intensity. Our demonstration shows that the higher-order orbital angular momentum states can be more penetrating due to their higher angular momentum and the skew rate. We also conducted theoretical studies and calculations for comparison with our experiments. Meanwhile, our work can be applied to make sensors, of which we have given one example for measuring magnetic fields in recent work. Our results could be useful to a wide range of applications, such as atmospheric physics. pacs: 52.35.We; 52.38.Dx; 85.75.Ss.