Study of electric field vector, angular momentum conservation and Poynting vector of nonparaxial beams

Abstract

Abstract The angular momentum (AM) of light, comprising spin and orbital AMs, is conserved and produces a spin-Hall shift in this process for paraxial beams. For nonparaxial beams, the spin and orbital AMs are non-separable and produce many changes in the beams’ spatial profile contrary to paraxial beams. These changes can be manifested as polarization modulation in the transverse plane, and conversion to orbital angular momentum (OAM) structured beams in the transverse and longitudinal planes, which can be estimated by studying the electric field vector in detail. We have calculated theoretically and simulated numerically the electric field vector components in the focal plane, to study the polarization modulation and AM conservation for OAM and Gaussian light beams of circular and linear polarizations and compared the results. Further, we have calculated and simulated the Poynting vector components for the corresponding fields to study the energy flow. We have considered the focusing of light beams using a high Numerical Aperture objective lens to obtain the nonparaxial beam, and presented a detailed theoretical analysis therein. The interpretation studies presented here are new, which may have many applications in nanophotonics and help in understanding the spin–orbit interaction at the fundamental level.