Formation of an elongated region of energy backflow using ring apertures

Abstract

In this paper, we have investigated the focusing of a second-order cylindrical vector beam by using a high numerical aperture (NA) lens limited by a ring aperture using the Richards-Wolf formulae. It was shown that the range of negative on-axis projections of the Poynting vector could be increased by increasing the depth of focus through the use of a ring aperture. It was shown that when focusing light with a lens with NA = 0.95, the use of a ring aperture limiting the entrance pupil angle to 0.9 of maximum, allows the depth of the region of negative on-axis Poynting vector projections to be four times increased, with the region width remaining almost unchanged and varying from 0.357 to 0.352 of the incident wavelength. Notably, the magnitude of the reverse energy flow was found to be larger than the direct one by a factor of 2.5.