Tailoring of arbitrary optical vector beams
By Christian Maurer, A. Jesacher, S. Fürhapter, S. Bernet, M. Ritsch-Marte. 2007
575 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present a robust interferometric method to generate arbitrary vector beam modes by diffracting a Gaussian laser beam from a spatial light modulator consisting of a high-resolution reflective nematic liquid crystal display. Vector beams may have the same intensity cross-section as the more common scalar Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) or Hermite–Gaussian (HG) beams, but with a spatially modulated polarization distribution. Special cases are the radially or azimuthally polarized ‘doughnut’ modes, which have superior focusing properties and promise novel applications in many fields, such as optical trapping, spectroscopy and super-resolution microscopy. Our system allows video rate switching between vector beam modes. We demonstrate the generation of high quality Hermite–Gaussian and Laguerre–Gaussian vector beam modes of different order, of vectorial anti-vortices, and of mode mixtures with interesting non-symmetric polarization distributions.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b270cf21064f6f6eecb93efe813c12731689a0c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Andrew Forbes
- C. Rosales-Guzmán
- Miles J. Padgett
- Jian Wang
- Ebrahim Karimi
- Lorenzo Marrucci
- Siddharth Ramachandran
- Martin P. J. Lavery
In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Optical communications using orbital angular momentum beams (2015, methodology): “This can be achieved using a phase-only SLM with a more complex phase hologram [37].”
- What spatial light modulators can do for optical microscopy (2011, methodology): “In order to investigate the 3D orientational distributions of fluorescent molecules in a sample [119, 120], SLMs can be used to generate a programmable vector field where both the lateral and the axial polarization field components in a focused spot can be controlled [121–124].”
- Roadmap on structured light (2016, background): “Various concepts based on liquid crystal cells [14, 66, 67] as well as segmented waveplates [68] have been discussed in the literature (see sections 6 and 8).”