Experimental observation of tangent-azimuthal non-spiral optical vortex

Optical vortices have attracted much attention recently due to their novel properties and widening applications. And lots of optical vortices can be obtained though most of them turn on spiral pattern on increasing azimuthal angle. In this paper, one kind of non-spiral optical vortex was proposed whose front phase distribution is tangent function of azimuthal angle. And this kind of optical vortices were also observed experimentally by computer-generated hologram method. It was found that when topological charge is smaller than unit one, vortex beam shape changes considerably on increasing topological charge, from hollow pattern to curve shape. When topological charge is bigger than unit and is times of 0.5, vortex beam turns symmetrical polygonal pattern though there is crack between adjacent sides, and the side number is twice of topological charge.