Focal intensity landscapes of tightly focused spatially varying bright ellipse fields

Abstract

Abstract Vector vortex beams play an important role in tailoring tightly focused fields by creating an additional longitudinal component at the focal plane. Until now, mainly focusing properties of fundamental, higher order vector fields and negative indexed ellipse fields have been investigated. In this paper we numerically analyze tight focusing behaviour of ellipse fields embedding C-point singularities of index I C = ± 1 2 , I C = ± 1 , I C = ± 3 2 and I C = ± 2 . We show that both the sign and absolute value of C-point index (I C ) of the ellipse fields play an important role in tailoring the focal intensity landscapes. For negative index C-points the intensity distribution of the longitudinal components show symmetries that correspond to the number of separatrices present in the polarization distribution. At the focal plane, both transverse and longitudinal components of the ellipse fields are found to be embedded with phase singularities. These ellipse fields can be useful in advanced microscopy for shaping the focus of light fields for various applications.