Light beams carrying a point singularity with a screw-type phase distribution are associated with an optical vortex. The corresponding momentum flow leads to an orbital angular momentum of the photons 1-3 . The study of optical vortices has led to applications such as particle micro-manipulation 4,5 , imaging 6 , interferometry 7 , quantum information 8 and highresolution microscopy and lithography 9 . Recent analyses showed that transitions forbidden by selection rules seem to be allowed when using optical vortex beams 10 . To exploit these intriguing new applications, it is often necessary to shorten the wavelength by nonlinear frequency conversion. However, during the conversion the optical vortices tend to break up 11-13 . Here we show that optical vortices can be generated in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) region using high-harmonic generation 14,15 . The singularity impressed on the fundamental beam survives the highly nonlinear process. Vortices in the XUV region have the same phase distribution as the driving field, which is in contradiction to previous findings 16 , where multiplication of the momentum by the harmonic order is expected. This approach opens the way for several applications based on vortex beams in the XUV region.Places where physical quantities become infinite or change abruptly are called singularities. The presence of phase dislocations (singularities) in the wavefront of a light beam determines both the phase and intensity structure around them. As the phase becomes indeterminate at singularities, both the real and the imaginary parts of the field amplitude (that is, also the field intensity) vanish. The characteristic helical phase profiles of optical vortices are described by exp(imθ) multipliers, where θ is the azimuthal coordinate and the integer number m is their topological charge, also called dislocation strength or winding number.Recalling the fact that in free space the Poynting vector gives the momentum flow, for helical phase fronts the Poynting vector has an azimuthal component that produces an orbital angular momentum parallel to the axis of the beam. The momentum circulates around the beam axis, so such beams are said to contain an optical vortex. As has been shown 1-3 , an m-fold charged optical vortex beam carries an orbital angular momentum of mh per photon independent of the spin angular momentum (that is, the polarization state). It was shown that transitions that are forbidden by known selection rules in the electric and magnetic dipole approximation seem to be allowed when using optical vortex beams 10 . This provides a new degree of freedom in the spectroscopy of forbidden transitions. Multi-coloured optical vortices can be generated through a nonlinear frequency-conversion process such as second-harmonic generation 16 or four-wave mixing, which is an important process in the white-light vortex generation. However, as predicted in ref. 11 and observed in ref. 12, vortex breakup in self-focusing nonlinear media is an important issue for supercontinuum vortex genera...

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Experiments performed with different vortex pump beams show for the first time the algebra of the vortex topological charge cascade, that evolves in the process of nonlinear wave mixing of optical vortex beams in Kerr media due to competition of four-wave mixing with self-and cross-phase modulation. This leads to the coherent generation of complex singular beams within a spectral bandwidth larger than 200nm. Our experimental results are in good agreement with frequency-domain numerical calculations that describe the newly generated spectral satellites.

In this work we report detailed experimental and numerical investigation of the white light generation by singly-and doubly-charged optical vortices propagating in a Kerr medium, where spectral broadening and transfer of topological charge (TC) into emerging spectral satellites takes place due to self-phase modulation and degenerate four-wave frequency mixing (FWFM). Experiments performed with different pump beams show an excellent agreement with theory. Singly-and doubly-charged white light vortices are observed within more than ±200nm after nonlinear propagation in Argon. Our experiment and theory data confirm that the topological charge transformation of the newly-generated spectral components follow a law analogous to the one for the energy conservation in the FWFM process. We also present results on the white light vortex stability.