Experimental study of an anomalous hollow beam with orbital angular momentum

Anomalous hollow beam has potential applications in the optical trapping and free space optical communications, etc. It is noted that, thus far, although a large number of studies have been carried out in this field, most of them are theoretical studies and only quite a few cases have experimental results. Here, we experimentally study the generating of anomalous hollow beam carrying orbital angular momentum, and measure its topological charge. We show that the number of dark rings in the Fourier transform of intensity patterns is equal to the topological charge. The experimental results agree well with the simulations.