Abstract
It is shown that at a given cross-section and a radius, a scalar, widesense stationary, beam-like optical field carrying Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) in L states can be uniquely characterized by the degree of orbitalization and the orbitalization ellipse pertaining to a plane in the L-dimensional OAM space, i.e., the function space spanned by basis {e^(ilϕ)}, l and ϕ being the OAM index and the polar angle, respectively. This characterization bears similarity with that in polarization optics.