Global beam shaping with nonuniformly polarized beams: a proposal

Abstract

A procedure for global beam shaping by modifying some global spatial parameters characteristic of the beam is proposed. This method is based on the generation of a nonuniformly polarized beam using a Mach-Zehnder system with two suitably shaped intensity transmittances and orthogonal linear polarizers. The changes in beam quality and kurtosis parameters after a linear polarizer placed at the output of the system are investigated.

Jones matrix treatment for optical Fourier processors with structured polarization

“…The generation of two dimensional polarization distributions has received great attention in the last years, and different methods to generate light beams with structured polarization have been theoretically proposed and experimentally probed, including the use of liquid crystal spatial light modulators [1], sub-wavelength gratings [2], polarization intereferometric setups [3], or linear polarizers with spatial variation [4]. Such polarization encodings have been successfully exploited in a variety of applications ranging from the formation of radially or azimuthally polarized beams [5], for producing sharper focusing [6,7], the formation of polarization sensitive computer generated holograms [8,9], or the realization of the so called polarization diffraction gratings [10], gratings with a periodic variation of the polarization component, with applications in polarimetry [11,12] or in the design of high efficient gratings [13].…”