Light field shaping by tailoring both phase and polarization.

We propose a method to generate a vectorial focal field with reconfigurable distributions for both the intensity and polarization state. The three-dimensional focal volume was configured by modulating the phase and polarization of the incident light. The incident light yielding the desired field was determined based on an iterative scheme involving vectorial diffraction calculations and fast Fourier transforms. Optical experiments on vectorial field shaping were performed to validate the feasibility of our method. This method may have applications in optical tweezers, such as for realizing the optical manipulation of particles via polarization modulation in addition to phase control.

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