Comparison of the energy characteristics of tightly focused needle beams with longitudinal polarization

Abstract

A comparative analysis is made of spatial variations in the energy characteristics of tightly focused, longitudinally polarized needle laser beams generated by an optical system with selective thin-film linear-to-radial polarization conversion, followed by their spatial filtering and tightannular focusing to subwavelength sizes. For the important special case of ideal radial polarization of a focused beam, longitudinal cross-sections of spatial distributions of the electric energy density and the Poynting vector modulus in the vicinity of the focus were compared by numerical simulation. It is shown that the degree of their difference increases substantially with decreasing angular zone of annular focusing and with the introduction of spatial-frequency filtering. It is established that the dimensions of the axial zone of beam focusing determined for their central lobes in the first approximation do not depend on the choice of energy characteristics used for their measurements.