Arbitrary cylindrical vector beam generation enabled by polarization-selective Gouy phase shifter

Abstract

Cylindrical vector beams (CVBs), which possess polarization distribution of rotational symmetry on the transverse plane, can be developed in many optical technologies. Conventional methods to generate CVBs contain redundant interferometers or need to switch among diverse elements, thus being inconvenient in applications containing multiple CVBs. Here we provide a passive polarization-selective device to substitute interferometers and simplify generation setup. It is accomplished by reversing topological charges of orbital angular momentum based on a polarization-selective Gouy phase. In the process, tunable input light is the only condition to generate a CVB with arbitrary topological charges. To cover both azimuthal and radial parameters of CVBs, we express the mapping between scalar Laguerre–Gaussian light on a basic Poincaré sphere and CVB on a high-order Poincaré sphere. The proposed device simplifies the generation of CVBs enormously and thus has potential in integrated devices for both quantum and classic optical experiments.