Focusing of high numerical aperture cylindrical-vector beams.

By K. Youngworth, T. Brown. Optics Express, 2000

1,512 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cylindrical-vector beams are of increasing recent interest for their role in novel laser resonators and their applications to electron acceleration and scanning microscopy. In this paper, we calculate cylindrical-vector fields, near the focal region of an aplanatic lens, and briefly discuss some applications. We show that, in the particular case of a tightly focused, radially polarized beam, the polarization shows large inhomogeneities in the focal region, while the azimuthally polarized beam is purely transverse even at very high numerical apertures.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a07d7b7acf0454710327de1e73974416758a3ee

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

1. Jian Wang
2. Poul Kristensen
3. Siddharth Ramachandran
4. Boris Lukyanchuk

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Jian Wang
2. Siddharth Ramachandran
3. Poul Kristensen
4. Boris Lukyanchuk

Citations in the corpus

• Optical vortices in fiber (2013, background): “In contrast, the contributions at focus from the different spatial portions of the radially polarized beam constructively interfere to create a very unique distribution of light at focus [3].”
• Creation of a needle of longitudinally polarized light in vacuum using binary optics (2008, background): “Although it seems to be rather questionable that this problem can be solved (to the best of our knowledge from the published papers), we want to demonstrate that it is possible to combine all of these contradictory requirements using a hybrid lens (a combination of a binary-phase optical element and”
• Advances in communications using optical vortices (2016, background): “For instance, at focus, the polarization orientation of a Gaussian beam is highly complex, resulting in self-aperturing effects, while a radially polarized beam yields an intense and well-defined electric field along the optic axis [4,34].”