Tailored polarization eigenstates of liquid crystal SLM to generate Laguerre-Gaussian beams

We use an SLM to generate laser beams of variable orbital angular momentum, also referred as Laguerre-Gaussian beams. Input beam polarization should match local birefringence of each pixel of the SLM. We identify the beam polarization eigenstates allowing generate L-G beams of different order owing to matching variable birefringence of separate pixels. Experimental results demonstrate an excellent agreement with simulations.