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Tighter spots of light with superposed orbital-angular-momentum beams

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Wozniak,  Pawel
Interference Microscopy and Nanooptics, Leuchs Division, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Max Planck Society;

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Banzer,  Peter
Interference Microscopy and Nanooptics, Leuchs Division, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Max Planck Society;

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Leuchs,  Gerd
Leuchs Division, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Wozniak, P., Banzer, P., Bouchard, F., Karimi, E., Leuchs, G., & Boyd, R. W. (2016). Tighter spots of light with superposed orbital-angular-momentum beams. PHYSICAL REVIEW A, 94(2): 021803. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.94.021803.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002D-6293-B
Abstract
The possibility of focusing light to an ever tighter spot has important implications for many applications and fields of optics research, such as nano-optics and plasmonics, laser-scanning microscopy, optical data storage, and many more. The size of lateral features of the field at the focus depends on several parameters, including the numerical aperture of the focusing system, but also the wavelength and polarization, phase and intensity distribution of the input beam. Here, we study the smallest achievable focal feature sizes of coherent superpositions of two copropagating beams carrying opposite orbital angular momentum. We investigate the feature sizes for this class of beams not only in the scalar limit, but also use a fully vectorial treatment to discuss the case of tight focusing. Both our numerical simulations and our experimental results confirm that lateral feature sizes considerably smaller than those of a tightly focused Gaussian light beam can be observed. These findings may pave the way for improving the resolution of imaging systems or may find applications in nano-optics experiments.