Affiliation:
1. Key Laboratory of Opto-electronic Information Science and Technology of Ministry of Education, School of Precision Instruments and Opto-electronics Engineering
Abstract
Structured light beams that possess unique polarization distribution could offer a new degree of freedom for a variety of applications, and hence its flexible polarization manipulation is necessary. Here we experimentally report a heterodyne interference-based method for generating femtosecond cylindrical vector beam (CVB) with high-speed controllable rotated polarization states. The femtosecond CVBs are created through the superposition of two optical vortices with opposite handedness. The use of two acoustic-optical modulators (AOMs) with frequency differences allows to achieve polarization rotation in a hopping-free scheme at on demand speed. Up to 1 MHz of the rotation frequency is demonstrated by visualizing the fast rotation events through a fast-frame-rate CCD camera. Moreover, we show our method can be readily extended to produce higher order CVBs with more complex rotated polarization distributions. Such a simple yet versatile femtosecond polarization-controlled laser system has the capability to act as a nonlinear trapping platform, thus opening tremendous potential opportunities in the fields of micromachining, nanofabrication, and so force.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Subject
Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics