An optical vortex refers to a beam whose wavefront appears as a helical shape[1–3]. Due to the helical variation of the phase during propagation, there is an indeterminate phase singularity at the center of the beam and the field amplitude vanishes at the phase singularity, resulting in a ‘doughnut’ shape in the spatial intensity profile of the optical vortex beam. The phase of the optical vortex wavefront varies helically around a central point, from 0 to 2πl, where l is the topological charge number of the optical vortex. Unlike the spin angular momentum (SAM) of circularly polarized beam, the optical vortex beam of order ±l carries orbital angular momentum (OAM) of ±lħ per photon. Furthermore, the amount of OAM can be many times larger than that of the SAM by tuning the topological charge. The OAM and the intensity distribution of the doughnut make the optical vortices important for quantum information[4–6], optical manipulation[7,8], super-resolution microscopy[9–11] and materials processing[12]. However, in addition to the above traditional optical vortex applications, implanting OAM into an intense ultrashort light beam opens a broad range of new possibilities. Infrared femtosecond optical vortex lasers combine the advantages of traditional femtosecond lasers with vortex beams and have important applications in optical micro–nano manipulation[13], time-resolved nonlocal spectroscopy in solids[14] and proton acceleration[15]. Due to the transverse field structure of the optical vortex, transverse phase-matching is especially relevant in the generation of extreme ultraviolet vortex beams by high-order harmonics (HHGs)[16–18]. In particular, for the spectral region around 1.5 μm, femtosecond optical vortex lasers also have important applications in space division multiplexing[19,20] due to their proximity to the communication band. For terahertz experiments, optical vortex lasers at wavelengths of 1.5 μm can be used as the pump to generate terahertz vortex beams. For a pump wavelength between 1.4 and 1.6 μm, many THz generation crystals, such as DAST and DSTMS, are clearly very well phase matched with a generated frequency at 1 THz and above 1.5 THz[21,22]. Therefore, infrared femtosecond optical vortex lasers have an important role in extending the wavelength coverage of optical vortices and vortex-based strong-field physics.