Needle of longitudinally polarized light using the circular Airy beam

Abstract

An optical needle is created using a radially polarized circular Airy beam with a conical angle, stemmed from the auto-focusing property of light beams. The utilization of the angular spectrum representation serves to illustrate the field distributions of the optical needle, and an explicit formula is provided to describe the angular spectrum of the light beam. The findings suggest that the optical needle exhibits a long depth of focus and well uniformity, and the full width at half maximum of the transverse field distribution is approximately 0.38 λ beyond the diffraction limit. The uniformity of the optical needle can be tailored by adjusting the width of the primary ring, the decay parameter, and the conical angle. Additionally, the depth of focus of the optical needle significantly improves as the radius of the primary ring increases while still maintaining well uniformity. It may find applications in high-resolution optical imaging and optical manipulation.