Plasmonic tomography of optical vortices.

We present a method for analyzing the wavefront of optical vortices that does not involve interferometry but rather uses surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). We employ a subwavelength slit in a gold film to cut slices from an optical vortex beam and measure the diffraction of the generated SPPs by scattering them off a second slit. By moving the slits across the vortex beam, we create a tomogram, from which we can determine the vortex charge of the incident beam at a glance.