Transversely polarized sub-diffraction optical needle with ultra-long depth of focus

Abstract

We generated purely transversely polarized sub-diffraction optical needles with ultra-long depth of focus (DOF) by focusing azimuthally polarized (AP) beams that were modulated by a vortex 0–2π phase plate and binary phase diffraction optical elements (DOEs). The concentric belts’ radii of the DOEs were optimized by a hybrid genetic particle swarm optimization (HGPSO) algorithm. For the focusing system with the numerical aperture (NA) of 0.95, an optical needle with the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 0.40λ and the DOF of 6.23λ was generated. Similar optical needles were also generated by binary phase DOEs with different belts. The results demonstrated that the binary phase DOEs could achieve smaller FWHMs and longer DOFs simultaneously. The generated needles were circularly polarized on the z-axis and there were no longitudinally polarized components in the focal fields. The radius fabrication errors of a DOE have little effect on the optical needle produced by itself. The generated optical needles can be applied to the fields of photolithography, high-density optical data storage, microscope imaging and particle trapping.