Terahertz vortex generation methods in rippled and vortex plasmas

Terahertz vortices have strong potential for many applications such as imaging and sensing in medicine, biomedical engineering, rotations of molecules, quantum condensation, optical tweezers, manipulation of electron beams, and communications. However, owing to recent developments, there has been less research about vortex generation in the terahertz domain. Due to the damaging limit and low conversion efficiency, a few schemes to generate terahertz vortices based on plasma have recently been reported. Generally, to excite the helicity of the terahertz vortices, two scenarios have been reported: one is transferring the orbital angular momentum from the plasma vortex to the emitted terahertz radiation, and the other is exciting the helicity of the terahertz vortices using twisted input lasers. This paper is a review of recent studies on terahertz vortex generation based on the rippled and vortex plasma substrata.