We report on the generation of light carrying orbital angular momentum through Bragg diffraction into an electromagnetically induced coherence grating in a degenerate two-level system of cold cesium atoms, demonstrating the c onservation the c onservation of orbital angular momentum of light in a coherent four-wave mixing process. The induced Zeeman coherence grating is shown to contain the spatial phase structure of the incident beams. The e xchange of phase information between a light beam with orbital angular momentum and a long-lived atomic coherence opens up the way to process quantum process information encoded in a multidimensional state space.
respectively. These observed results show that signal and generated beams have topological charge with the same magnitude and sign. Therefore, since they propagate in opposite directions, they should carry opposite OAM, thus demonstrating the conservation of OAM within the light modes involved in this process. Similar results were obtained for a single charge signal beam. Our results present a first step towards the storage of a multidimensional quantum state in a long-lived atomic coherence, a subject that presents a considerable actual interest.