Characterization of topological charge and orbital angular momentum of shaped optical vortices.

Optical vortices (OV) are usually associated to cylindrically symmetric light beams. However, they can have more general geometries that extends their applicability. Since the typical experimental characterization methods are not appropriate for OV with arbitrary shapes, we discuss in this work how the definitions of the classical orbital angular momentum and the topological charge can be used to retrieve these informations in the general case. The concepts discussed are experimentally demonstrated and may be specially useful in areas such as optical tweezers and plasmonics.