Creation of a new vector field and focusing engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for creating vector fields with radial-variant states of polarization, enabling flexible and complex polarization distributions for advanced optical applications like focusing and trapping.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach to generate vector fields with radial control of polarization, expanding the design possibilities beyond azimuthal-only dependence.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated in experiments

Allows arbitrary complex polarization distributions

Enhances optical trapping capabilities

Abstract

Recently many methods have been proposed to create the vector fields, due to the academic interest and a variety of attractive applications such as for particle acceleration, optical trapping, particle manipulation, and fluorescence imaging. For the most of the created vector fields, the spatial distribution in states of polarization (SoPs) is dependent of azimuthal angle only. It is very interesting and crucial that if we can introduce the radial controlling freedom, which undoubtedly opens a new way to provide the flexibility for creating the desired vector fields and for fulfilling the requirement on a variety of applications. Here we present a new idea to create a new kind of vector filed with the radial-variant SoPs. This idea also permits to create flexibly vector fields with arbitrarily complex distribution of SoPs, based on a combination of radial and azimuthal dependency. This realization in both principle and experiment is paramount to be able to implement the focusing engineering for applications in a variety of realms. Specially arranging the SoPs of vector fields, purposefully and carefully, is anticipated to lead to new effects and phenomena that can expand the functionality and enhance the capability of optical systems, such as the optical trapping.