Full Poincaré beams

Miguel A. Alonso; Amber M. Beckley; Thomas G. Brown

doi:10.1117/12.903258

25 October 2011 Full Poincaré beams

Miguel A. Alonso, Amber M. Beckley, Thomas G. Brown

Proceedings Volume 8011, 22nd Congress of the International Commission for Optics: Light for the Development of the World; 80111M (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.903258
Event: International Commission for Optics (ICO 22), 2011, Puebla, Mexico

Abstract

We describe an analytic formulation that describes the spatial behavior and propagation of a class of fully correlated beams that span the complete Poincaré sphere. The beams can be constructed from a superposition of a fundamental Gaussian mode and a spiral phase Laguerre-Gauss (LG) mode having orthogonal polarization. When the orthogonal polarizations are right and left circular, the coverage extends from one pole of the sphere to the other in such a way that concentric circles on the beam map onto parallels on the Poincaré sphere and radial lines map onto meridians. If the beam waists match, the beam propagation corresponds to a rigid rotation about the pole; a mismatch in beam waist size or position produces a beam in which parallels rotate at different rates with propagation distance. We describe an experimental example of how a symmetrically stressed window can produce these beams and show that the predicted rotation indeed occurs when moving through the focus of a paraxial Gaussian beam. We discuss nonparaxial behavior and end with a discussion of how the idea can be extended to include beams that not only cover the surface of the Poincaré sphere, but fill the volume within the sphere.

Citation Download Citation

Miguel A. Alonso, Amber M. Beckley, and Thomas G. Brown "Full Poincaré beams", Proc. SPIE 8011, 22nd Congress of the International Commission for Optics: Light for the Development of the World, 80111M (25 October 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.903258

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