Asymmetric Bessel modes.

We propose a new, three-parameter family of diffraction-free asymmetric elegant Bessel modes (aB-modes) with an integer and fractional orbital angular momentum (OAM). The aB-modes are described by the nth-order Bessel function of the first kind with complex argument. The asymmetry degree of the nonparaxial aB-mode is shown to depend on a real parameter c≥0: when c=0, the aB-mode is identical to a conventional radially symmetric Bessel mode; with increasing c, the aB-mode starts to acquire a crescent form, getting stretched along the vertical axis and shifted along the horizontal axis for c≫1. On the horizontal axis, the aB-modes have a denumerable number of isolated intensity zeros that generate optical vortices with a unit topological charge of opposite sign on opposite sides of 0. At different values of the parameter c, the intensity zeros change their location on the horizontal axis, thus changing the beam's OAM. An isolated intensity zero on the optical axis generates an optical vortex with topological charge n. The OAM per photon of an aB-mode depends near-linearly on c, being equal to ℏ(n+cI1(2c)/I0(2c)), where ℏ is the Planck constant and In(x) is a modified Bessel function.