Generation of volumetrically full Poincaré beams.

ABSTRACT

Optical communications, remote sensing, particle trapping, and high-resolution imaging are a few research areas that benefit from new techniques to generate structured light. We present a method of generating polarization-structured laser beams that contain both full and partial polarization states. We demonstrate this method by generating an optical beam that contains every state of partial and full polarization. We refer to this beam as a volumetrically full Poincaré beam to distinguish it from full Poincaré beams, which contain all states of full polarization only. In contrast to methods relying upon spatial coherence to generate polarization-structured beams with partial polarization, our method creates well-collimated beams by relying upon temporal coherence.