Focus shaping using cylindrical vector beams

Qiwen Zhan and James R. Leger

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota,
200 Union Street SE, Minneapolis MN 55455, USA
[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract: We report a focus shaping technique using generalized

cylindrical vector beams. A generalized cylindrical vector beam can be
decomposed into radially polarized and azimuthally polarized components.
Such a generalized cylindrical beam can be generated from a radially
polarized or an azimuthally polarized light using a two-half-wave-plate
polarization rotator. The intensity pattern at the focus can be tailored by
appropriately adjusting the rotation angle. Peak-centered, donut and flattop
focal shapes can be obtained using this technique.
2002 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (110.2990) Imaging formation theory; (140.3300) Laser beam shaping;
(170.4520) Optical confinement and manipulation; (260.5430) Polarization

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1. Introduction
Recently, there is an increasing interest in laser beams with cylindrical symmetry in
polarization. These so-called cylindrical vector beams can be generated by active or passive
methods [1-7] and have been the topic of numerous recent theoretical and experimental
investigations [8-20]. Applications of such beams include microscopy, lithography [8],
frequency shifting [15], electron acceleration [16], optical trapping and manipulating [17, 18],
material processing [19] and high-resolution metrology [20]. Among these applications,
particular interest has been given to the high numerical aperture (NA) focusing property of
these beams and their application as a high-resolution probe. Due to the symmetry of the
polarization, the electric field at the focus of a cylindrical vector beam has unique polarization
properties. For example, it has been shown that the longitudinal component of the focus from
such a cylindrical beam is much stronger than the transversal component, and the size of the
longitudinal focus is much smaller than the transversal focus [9, 10]. This property could find
applications in high-resolution microscopy, microlithography, metrology and nonlinear optics,
etc.
To the best of our knowledge, previous research has dealt with the high NA focusing of
either radially polarized or azimuthally polarized light. In this paper, we study the focusing
property of a generalized cylindrical vector beam. A generalized cylindrical vector beam can
be decomposed into a linear superposition of radially polarized and azimuthally polarized
components. A simple polarization rotator consisting of two half-wave plates can be used to
convert a radially polarized beam or azimuthally polarized beam into such a generalized
cylindrical vector beam.
In section 2, we present the mathematical expression of a generalized cylindrical vector
beam and the methods of generating such a beam. We will then present the high NA focusing
property of this type of beam using the Richards and Wolf vectorial diffraction method in
section 3. We will show that a flattop focus can be generated for a particular generalized
cylindrical vector beam. In section 4, we will briefly discuss the applications of this technique.
2. Generating a generalized cylindrical vector beam
Figure 1 shows the polarization pattern of a generalized cylindrical vector beam. Instead of
a radial polarization or an azimuthal polarization, each point of the beam has a polarization
rotated by φ0 from its radial direction. The electrical field of this beam can be expressed in a
cylindrical coordinate system as
E ( r , ϕ ) = P [cos φ 0 e r + sin φ 0 e ϕ ] (1)

where e r is the unit vector in the radial direction and eϕ is the unit vector in the azimuthal
direction. P is the pupil apodization function denoting the relative amplitude of the field,
which only depends on radial position. Thus, a generalized cylindrical vector beam is just a
linear superposition of a cylindrically symmetric radial polarization and a cylindrically
symmetric azimuthal polarization.
Many techniques to generate radially polarized beams or azimuthally polarized beams
have been reported. Some of them, e.g. a space-variant liquid crystal cell [4], may be used to
create generalized cylindrical vector beams. However, usually the polarization pattern created
by these methods is fixed and there is less flexibility of alternating the polarization pattern. In
this paper, we propose a simple and flexible technique that can convert a radial polarization or

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azimuthal polarization into a generalized cylindrical polarization. A simple polarization
rotator consisting of two half-wave plates can be used to perform such a conversion [19, 20].
Figure 2 shows the proposed polarization rotator. The Jones matrix of this polarization rotator
can be shown as [20]
 cos( 2 ∆ φ ) − sin( 2 ∆ φ ) 
T =   = R (−2∆ φ ) (2)
 sin( 2 ∆ φ ) cos( 2 ∆ φ ) 
Unlike the rotation from a single half-wave plate, this rotation operation is independent of the
initial polarization. The amount of rotation is determined by the angle ∆φ between the fast
axes of the two half-wave plates. When ∆φ=φ0/2, a generalized cylindrical vector beam
illustrated in figure 1 can be generated from a radially polarized beam. By simply rotating one
of the half-wave plates, we can vary ∆φ and control the angle φ0, thus generating different
cylindrical vector beams. Such flexibility is very important to the focus shaping technique we
will discuss in the next section.

φ0

Fig.1 Generalized cylindrical vector beam with φ0 rotation from the purely radially polarization.

∆φ

Fig. 2. A polarization rotator consisting of two half-wave plates. ∆φ is the angle between the fast
axes of the two half-wave plates.

3. Focus shaping using generalized cylindrical vector beams

The basic focusing property of highly focused polarized beams can be analyzed with the
Richards and Wolf vectorial diffraction method [21, 22]. This method has been extensively
used to study cases in which the illumination on the pupil has no spatial variation in
polarization [23]. This method has also been used to calculate the electric fields in the vicinity
of the focal spot for radial and azimuthal polarization [11, 12]. In this paper, we further extend
this calculation for a generalized cylindrical vector beam illumination.
3.1 Geometry and mathematics
The geometry of the problem is shown in figure 3. The illumination is a generalized
cylindrical vector beam described by equation (1), which assumes a planar wavefront over the
pupil. An aplanatic lens produces a spherical wave converging to the focus of the lens. Since
this beam can be expressed as a linear superposition of radial polarization and azimuthal
polarization, the field near the focus can be expressed as linear combination of the focal fields

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of radial polarization and azimuthal polarization. Adopting the expressions for the radial
polarization and azimuthal polarization developed by Youngworth and Brown [11], the focal
field of a generalized cylindrical beam can be written as
E ( r ,ϕ , z ) = E r e r + Eze z + Eϕ eϕ (3)

where e z is the unit vector in the z direction. Er, Ez and Eϕ are the amplitudes of the three
orthogonal components that can be written as
θ max

E r ( r , ϕ , z ) = A cos φ 0 ∫ cos 1 / 2 (θ ) P (θ ) sin θ cos θ J 1 ( kr sin θ ) e ikz cos θ d θ (4)

0
θ max

E z ( r , ϕ , z ) = iA cos φ 0 ∫ cos 1 / 2 (θ )P (θ ) sin 2 θ J 0 ( kr sin θ ) e ikz cos θ d θ (5)

0
θ max

E ϕ ( r , ϕ , z ) = A sin φ 0 ∫ cos 1 / 2 (θ )P (θ ) J 1 ( kr sin θ ) e ikz cos θ d θ (6)

0
where θmax is the maximal angle determined by the numerical aperture of the objective lens,
P(θ) is the pupil apodization function, k is the wave number and Jn(x) is the Bessel function of
the first kind with order n. Note that all components are independent of ϕ, which means the
field maintains cylindrical symmetry. With these equations, we can calculate the intensity and
amplitude distributions corresponding to different components as well as the total field in the
vicinity of focus.
Objective lens
y

Q(r,ϕ)
Cylindrical
vector x
ϕ
incident
θ
beam
z=0
z

Fig. 3 Focusing of a cylindrical vector beam. In the diagram, f is the focal length of the objective lens. Q(r, ϕ) is an
observation point in the focal plane.

Fig.4 Intensity distribution at focal plane for radially polarized beam.

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 For all the examples in this paper, we choose a simple annulus pupil apodization function:
1 if sin -1 (0.1) ≤ θ ≤ sin -1 ( NA )
P (θ ) =  (7)
 0 otherwise
The NA of the lens is chosen to be 0.8 and the length unit is normalized to wavelength,
therefore, λ=1.
3.2 Focusing of radially and azimuthally polarized beams
Fig. 4 shows the calculated results for φ0=0°, which corresponds to a radially polarized
incident beam. The two dimensional intensity distributions at the vicinity of the focus are
shown in Fig. 5. The transversal intensity is the sum of the azimuthal intensity and radial
intensity. In this case, the azimuthal component disappears and only the radial and
longitudinal components are present. Thus the transversal field is purely radially polarized.
One observation is that the longitudinal component is stronger than the transversal component
and has only half of the width (approximately) of the total intensity distribution. If certain
physical mechanisms can be applied such that the object at focal plane only responds to the
longitudinal component, the resolution of the optical system will be increased by a factor of
two [10].

Longitudinal component Radial component

Total intensity

Fig.5 Intensity distribution in the vicinity of focus for radially polarized beam.

φ0=90° corresponds to an azimuthally polarized incident beam. In this case, only the
azimuthal component is present at the focus (see Fig. 6). The two dimensional distribution is
shown in Fig. 7. This donut shape focus has been reported previously [11].

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 0.14
Radial
Longitudinal
0.12 Azimuthal
Transversal
Total
0.1

Intensity (a.u.) 0.08

0.06

0.04

0.02

0
-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
r (wavelength)
Fig.6 Intensity distribution at the focal plane for an azimuthally polarized beam. The focal
field only has an azimuthal component. The radial and longitudinal components are zero.

From Fig. 4 and Fig. 6, we noticed that the radial and azimuthal polarization components
of the foci resemble donuts that have dark centers. The sizes of the donut shapes of these two
components are similar. For the longitudinal polarization component, however, there is only
one bright sharp peak at the center. The size of this peak is similar to the size of the dark
center of the donut shape. These observations indicate that we can obtain a flattop total
intensity distribution at the focus by adjusting the weightings of the three field components
through controlling φ0. This control of φ0 can be achieved using the pure polarization rotators
described previously.

Fig. 7 Total intensity distributions in the vicinity of focus for azimuthally polarized
beam.

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3.3Flattop focusing
For our particular calculation setup, the flattop condition is found to be at φ0=24°. The
intensity distributions at the focal plane are plotted in Fig. 8 and the corresponding two
dimensional total intensity through the focus (in r-z plane) is shown in Fig. 9. A flattop total
intensity distribution in the focal plane is obtained.

0.14
Radial
Longitudinal
0.12 Azimuthal
Transversal
Total
0.1
Intensity (a.u.)

0.08

0.06

0.04

0.02

0
-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
r (wavelength)

Fig.8 Intensity distribution at focal plane for φ0=24°. Flattop focus is obtained.

Fig. 9 Total intensity distribution in the vicinity of focus for φ0=24°.

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4. Applications and discussions
4.1Aplication to optical tweezers
Optical tweezers is an optical tool that uses a tightly focus laser beam to trap and
manipulate small particles, such as atoms, molecules, cells, etc. It has wide applications in
many areas, such as DNA sequencing, genes transplant, micro-assembly and micro-
machining. The origin of the trapping force is the gradient of field intensity. Generally, this
gradient force can be expressed as [24]

ε1  ε 2 − ε1 
F ∇ = 2π R 3 

∇ I (8)
c  ε 2 + 2 ε 1 
where R is the size of the particle, c is the speed of light in vacuum, ∇I is the gradient of the
intensity , ε1 is the dielectric constant of the ambient and ε2 is the dielectric constant of the
particle. From this equation, we can see that the trapping performance depends on the
dielectric constants of the particle and the ambient. If ε1<ε2, the gradient force tends to pull
and trap the particle to the highest intensity region of the focused beam. On the contrary, this
gradient force tends to pull and trap the particle to the lowest intensity region if ε1>ε2. Most
existing optical tweezers use a focused Gaussian beam, which has the highest intensity at the
center. Thus they are only suitable for trapping and manipulating particles with a dielectric
constant higher than the ambient. For particles with a dielectric constant lower than the
ambient, a specifically designed laser mode such as a donut mode needs to be applied. Using
our focus tailoring method, we can easily change the focal intensity distribution from a donut
shape to a peak-centered shape by adjusting the amount of rotation from the two-half-wave-
plate polarization rotator, thus enabling trapping and manipulating a wide variety of particles
in the same optical system.
4.2 Other applications
The flattop focus obtained above may also find other applications such as improved
printing filling factor, improved uniformity and quality in materials processing and micro-
lithography, and so on. In our calculations, we have used a very simple pupil apodization
function. However, the pupil apodization provides another degree of freedom to shape the
focus. It is possible to improve the quality of the flattop focus, such as the edge abruptness, by
using a more complex pupil apodization function.
5. Conclusions
We have described a unique far-field beam shaping technique - focus shaping using
generalized cylindrical vector beams. A simple polarization rotator setup is proposed for the
generation and modification of generalized cylindrical vector beams, which, in turn, can be
used to modify the focal intensity shape. At a particular condition, a flattop focus can be
generated. The focus shaping technique may find wide applications, such as optical tweezers,
laser printing and material processing.
Acknowledgement
This work is supported by the CyberOptics Corp. The authors are thankful for their support.

#889 - $15.00 US Received February 20, 2002; Revised March 27, 2002
(C) 2002 OSA 8 April 2002 / Vol. 10, No. 7 / OPTICS EXPRESS 331