  A novel optical device is designed and fabricated in order to overcome the
limits of the traditional sorter based on log-pol optical transformation for
the demultiplexing of optical beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM).
The proposed configuration simplifies the alignment procedure and significantly
improves the compactness and miniaturization level of the optical architecture.
Since the device requires to operate beyond the paraxial approximation, a
rigorous formulation of transformation optics in the non-paraxial regime has
been developed and applied. The sample has been fabricated as 256-level
phase-only diffractive optics with high-resolution electron-beam lithography,
and tested for the demultiplexing of OAM beams at the telecom wavelength of
1310 nm. The designed sorter can find promising applications in next-generation
optical platforms for mode-division multiplexing based on OAM modes both for
free-space and multi-mode fiber transmission.
