Nonlinear frequency conversion and manipulation of vector beams in a Sagnac loop.

ABSTRACT

Vector beams (VBs) are widely investigated for their special intensities and polarization distributions, which are useful in optical micromanipulation, optical microfabrication, optical communication, and single molecule imaging. To date, nonlinear frequency conversion (NFC) and manipulation of VBs remain challenging because of the polarization sensitivity of most nonlinear processes. Here we report an experimental realization of NFC and manipulation of VBs that can be used to expand the available frequency band. The main idea of our scheme is the introduction of a Sagnac loop to solve the polarization dependence problem of NFC in nonlinear crystals. Additionally, we find that a linearly polarized VB should be transformed into a hybrid-polarized VB in exponential form before performing NFC. The experimental results agree well with those of our theoretical model. The proposed method is also applicable to other wavebands and second-order nonlinear processes, and may be generalized to the quantum regime for single photons.