Abstract
The paper briefly presents some essential concepts and features of light fields with strong spatial inhomogeneity of amplitude, phase, polarization, and other parameters. It contains a characterization of optical vortices, speckle fields, polarization singularities. A special attention is paid to the field dynamical characteristics (energy, momentum, angular momentum, and their derivatives), which are considered not only as mechanical attributes of the field but also as its meaningful and application-oriented descriptive parameters. Peculiar features of the light dynamical characteristics in inhomogeneous and dispersive media are discussed. The dynamical properties of paraxial beams and evanescent waves (including surface plasmon–polaritons) are analyzed in more detail; in particular, a general treatment of the extraordinary spin and momentum, orthogonal to the main propagation direction, is outlined. Applications of structured light fields for optical manipulation, metrology, probing, and data processing are described.
Highlights
Despite the intensive development of the concepts and instruments, for a long time, the optical science operated with a rather limited set of the traditional optical field models
In conclusion of this section, we present the paraxial expression of the reactive momentum (25): pMR
EVANESCENT WAVES: EXTRAORDINARY SPIN AND MOMENTUM. Another characteristic and very important example of structured light fields is supplied by evanescent waves (EW) [1, 85]
Summary
Despite the intensive development of the concepts and instruments, for a long time, the optical science operated with a rather limited set of the traditional optical field models. The mechanical action of the field “per se” is determined by the “pure” field parts of the spin or momentum discussed in the General Definitions subsection, whereas the mechanical action of the medium motions (if it exists) is determined by some completely different non-electromagnetic mechanisms In this context, the last element of the DC set discussed in this paper, the reactive momentum (25), shows no known physical manifestations related to the dispersion; that is why the search of its dispersion-modified expression currently looks meaningless [39, 84]. The last element of the DC set discussed in this paper, the reactive momentum (25), shows no known physical manifestations related to the dispersion; that is why the search of its dispersion-modified expression currently looks meaningless [39, 84] Another characteristic and very important example of structured light fields is supplied by evanescent waves (EW) [1, 85]. Three-dimensional structured vector fields will enable an innovative platform for subwavelength lithography and selective excitation of structured matter with complex topology
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