涡旋光激光器能够输出具有特定空间结构的高能量、高质量的涡旋光束.涡旋光束在光通讯、光操控、超分辨成像等领域都有潜在的应用前景.本文介绍了涡旋光束的产生原理及其应用,综述了近期涡旋光激光器的发展历程,同时也对涡旋光激光器的发展趋势进行了展望.“,”The vortex beam laser outputs a high-energy and high-quality vortex beam,which is one typical structured light field.Vortex beam has potential applications in many important fields,such as optical communications,optical manipulation,precision measurement,quantum information,and superresolution imaging.Therefore,how to efficiently generate high quality vortex beam has attracted considerable interests of research in recent years.In this paper,we first briefly introduce the generation principle and main applications of the vortex beam.There are two main ways of generating vortex beams,i.e.,active method and passive method.Compared with active method,passive method generally suffers from low conversion efficiency and poor beam quality(especially for high order vortex beams).When a high quality vortex beam is needed,active method is a better choice.The active method generates vortex beams under laser configuration.For example,the high purity vortex beam can be generated by using the mode selection of the laser cavity.At present,the research focus on vortex beam laser is to improve the laser performance and the mode purity of the output vortex beam.In addition,the integration of vortex beam laser,which facilitates various commercial applications,is also a hot topic.Then,we review the recent progress of vortex beam lasers,including solid-state vortex laser,vortex-beam optical parametric oscillator,fiber vortex laser and on-chip integrated vortex lasers.Solid-state vortex laser is one of the most common methods to generate a vortex beam.By properly designing various types of resonators,one can generate the desired laser vortex mode while suppressing the unwanted ones.Taking Laguerre-Gaussian beams as an example,one can use the pump shaping technique to transform the pump beam from a Gaussian beam to a ring shaped intensity profile,which can effectively enhance the gain of the matched Laguerre-Gaussian cavity mode and decrease the gain of other modes.In addition,a tilted etalon can also be used in the resonant cavity to precisely control the gain and loss of different cavity modes.A recent method is to add spatial phase modulation elements(such as spiral phase plate,vortex half-wave plate,and so on)into the cavity.By satisfying the polarization and spatial mode self-reproduction condition of the cavity mode,the output beam can carry a specific spiral phase,i.e.,one can obtain a desired vortex laser beam.Interestingly,the use of spatial light modulators and metasurface greatly enriches the types of output spatial light beams.By loading different holograms on the spatial light modulators or properly designing the structures of the metasurfaces,one can get various types of vortex modes,including those with large l and p indices that are difficult to be produced in the previous methods.Along with the foundation of solid state vortex laser,other forms of vortex beam lasers have also been rapidly developed in recent years.Vortex beam parametric oscillator can achieve the output of vortex beam with a tunable wavelength by controlling the phase matching conditions.Compared with the solid state vortex laser,the output wavelength band of vortex beam is greatly expanded.The fiber vortex laser uses the fiber configuration to output vortex beam.The low cost and high stability of the fiber laser can be effectively combined with the vortex beam output for practical applications in high capacity information transmission.This unique characteristic makes fiber vortex laser particularly useful in the field of optical fiber communication.The development of micro/nano fabrication techniques make it possible to integrate vortex lasers on a chip.Finally,we present the prospects of the future development of the vortex beam laser.High conversion efficiency and high mode purity are two critical requirements for high end applications of vortex beam lasers.