Spatially engineered polarization states and optical vortices in uniaxial crystals
Date
2010-05-10
Authors
Fadeyeva, Tatyana
Shvedov, Vladlen
Izdebskaya, Yana
Volyar, Alexander
Brasselet, Etienne
Neshev, Dragomir
Desyatnikov, Anton S
Krolikowski, Wieslaw
Kivshar, Yuri
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Volume Title
Publisher
Optical Society of America
Abstract
We describe how the propagation of light through uniaxial
crystals can be used as a versatile tool towards the spatial engineering
of polarization and phase, thereby providing an all-optical technique for
vectorial and scalar singular beam shaping in optics. Besides the prominent
role played by the linear birefringence, the influence of circular birefringence
(the optical activity) is discussed as well and both the monochromatic
and polychromatic singular beam shaping strategies are addressed. Under
cylindrically symmetric light-matter interaction, the radially, azimuthally,
and spirally polarized eigen-modes for the light field are revealed to be of
a fundamental interest to describe the physical mechanisms at work when
dealing with scalar and vectorial optical singularities. In addition, we also
report on nontrivial effects arising from cylindrical symmetry breaking, e.g.
tilting the incident beam with respect to the crystal optical axis.
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Keywords
crystal optics, birefringence, singular optics
Citation
Optics Express 18.10 (2010): 10848-10863
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Source
Optics Express
Type
Journal article
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