Arbitrary cylindrical vector beam generation enabled by polarization-selective Gouy phase shifter

Abstract

Cylindrical vector beams (CVBs), which possesses polarization distribution of rotational symmetry on the transverse plane, can be developed in many optical technologies. Conventional methods to generate CVBs contain redundant interferometers or need to switch among diverse elements, thus being inconvenient in applications containing multiple CVBs.Here we provide a passive polarization-selective device to substitute interferometers and simplify generation setup. It is accomplished by reversing topological charges of orbital angular momentum based on polarization-selective Gouy phase. In the process, tunable input light is the only condition to generate CVB with arbitrary topological charges. To cover both azimuthal and radial parameters of CVBs, we express the mapping between scalar Laguerre-Gaussian light on basic Poincaré sphere and CVB on high-order Poincaré sphere. The proposed device simplifies the generation of CVBs enormously, and thus has potentials in integrated devices for both quantum and classic optical experiments.

Synthesis and observation of optical skyrmionic structure in free space

“…the eigenstates of the Pauli operators, and the measurement results correspond to {I x1 , I x2 , I y1 , I y2 , I z1 , I z2 }. The CCD then records the transverse profile of the beam that passes through PBS2 in the form of matrices [16][17][18][19].…”