Experimental investigation of local properties and statistics of optical vortices in random wave fields.

We present the first direct experimental evidence of the local properties of optical vortices in a random laser speckle field. We have observed the Berry anisotropy ellipse describing the anisotropic squeezing of phase lines close to vortex cores and quantitatively verified the Dennis angular momentum rule for its phase. Some statistics associated with vortices, such as density, anisotropy ellipse eccentricity, and its relation to zero crossings of real and imaginary parts of the random field, are also investigated by experiments.