The twisted light modes used in modern atomic physics experiments can be contaminated by small admixtures of plane-wave radiation. Although these admixtures hardly reveal themselves in the beam-intensity profile, they may seriously affect the outcome of high-precision spectroscopy measurements. In the present study we propose a method for diagnosing such a plane-wave contamination which is based on the analysis of the magnetic sublevel population of atoms or ions interacting with the ``twisted $+$ plane-wave'' radiation. In order to theoretically investigate the sublevel populations, we solve the Liouville--von Neumann equation for the time evolution of the atomic density matrix. The proposed method is illustrated for the electric dipole 5s0.16em0ex²S1/2-5p0.16em0ex²P3/2 transition in Rb induced by (linearly, radially, or azimuthally polarized) vortex light with just a small contamination. We find that even tiny admixtures of plane-wave radiation can lead to remarkable variations in the populations of the ground-state magnetic sublevels. This opens up new opportunities for diagnostics of twisted light in atomic spectroscopy experiments.
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Schmidt et al. (2024) studied this question.
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