On the dual-cone nature of the conical refraction phenomenon

Abstract

In conical refraction (CR), a focused Gaussian input beam passing through a biaxial crystal and parallel to one of the optic axes is transformed into a pair of concentric bright rings split by a dark (Poggendorff) ring at the focal plane. Here, we show the generation of a CR transverse pattern that does not present the Poggendorff fine splitting at the focal plane, i.e. it forms a single light ring. This light ring is generated from a non-homogeneously polarized input light beam obtained by using a spatially inhomogeneous polarizer that mimics the characteristic CR polarization distribution. This polarizer allows modulating the relative intensity between the two CR light cones in accordance with the recently proposed dual-cone model of the CR phenomenon. We show that the absence of interfering rings at the focal plane is caused by the selection of one of the two CR cones.

Conical refraction: fundamentals and applications

“…Recently it was proposed that the CR beam can be understood as the interaction of two light cones with slightly different positions of their vertices along the axial direction [59]. Our contribution to this picture has been the reformulation of the dual-cone model of CR and also the experimental demonstration of the existence of two light cones without the need of blocking the beam at any part [56]. A segmented linear polarizer that mimics the usual CR polarization distribution has been used in order to select each of the cones and modify the intensity ratio between the inner and the outer rings of CR.…”

“…Note that alternatively Dreger [57] and Garnier [58] have reported the solutions of optical beam propagation in biaxial crystals, although in both cases the theory presented is very involved. On the other hand, Sokolovskii and co-workers showed that the Belsky-Khapalyuk-Berry equations can be re-arranged so that they describe CR in terms of the interference between two co-propagating cones [59], being this theory demonstrated experimentally and newly re-formulated by us [56], as it is shown in Section 2.4. Alternatively, we have also presented a novel proposal that can be used to easily predict the CR pattern at the focal plane by means of a wave-vector and polarization formalism [54] that can be also used in a cascade of biaxial crystals, as we have also shown in Ref.…”

“…[52][53][54][55][56] and has been done in collaboration of Alba Peinado,Ángel Lizana, Irene Estévez and Juan Campos from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Hiromitsu Tomizawa from the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute, Asticio Vargas and Fabián A. TorresRuiz from the Universidad de Concepción; and Ignacio Moreno from the Universidad Miguel Hernández.…”

Conical refraction of a high-M2 laser beam

“…Also, G.S.Sokolovskii et al 13 and later on A.Turpin et al 14 have shown that these equations can be transformed in a way enabling the electric displacement vector D to be written as:…”

“…Therefore, with M 2 >1 one should observe more than one dark ring in the Lloyd's plane. The results of numerical simulations with (14) for М …”