Related papers: The paraxial approximation fails to describe the i…
Easily accessible through tabletop experiments based on laser propagation inside nonlinear optical media, Paraxial Fluids of Light are emerging as promising platforms for the simulation and exploration of quantum-like phenomena. In…
This tutorial provides an overview of the local description of polarization for nonparaxial light, for which all Cartesian components of the electric field are significant. The polarization of light at each point is characterized by a $3$…
Counter-propagating co-axial Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams are considered, not in the familiar scenario where the focal planes coincide at $z=0$, but when they are separated by a finite axial distance $d$. The simplest case is where both…
Light beams can carry a discrete, in principle unbounded amount of angular momentum. Examples of such beams, the Laguerre-Gauss modes, are frequently expressed as solutions of the paraxial wave equation. There, they are eigenstates of the…
An atom placed in an optical vortex close to the axis may, upon absorbing a photon, acquire a transverse momentum much larger than the transverse momentum of any plane-wave component of the vortex lightfield. This surprising phenomenon…
Structured light, when strongly focused, generates highly confined vectorial electromagnetic field distributions which may feature a polarization component along the optical axis. Manipulating and detecting such 3D light fields is…
Optical near field has been generated by Laguarre-Gaussian doughnut beam on inner surface of "atom funnel". The resulting optical near field has been measured with the help of fiber probe and a consequent effect on cold atoms- released from…
We characterize the interaction between a single atom or similar microscopic system and a light field via the scattering ratio. For that, we first derive the electrical field in a strongly focused Gaussian light beam, and then consider the…
An optical vortex (phase singularity) with a high topological strength resides on the axis of a high-order light beam. The breakup of this vortex under elliptic perturbation into a straight row of unit strength vortices is described. This…
Beam propagation beyond the paraxial approximation is studied in an optically written waveguide structure. The waveguide structure that leads to diffractionless light propagation, is imprinted on a medium consisting of a five-level atomic…
We explore the morphological properties of symmetric Airy beams in the paraxial and nonparaxial regimes. We consider a 2D electromagnetic realization with a single transverse component of the electric field, and in the nonparaxial regime,…
Based on the Kirchhoff-Fresnel approximation, we consider behavior of the optical vortices (OV) upon propagation of the diffracted Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams with topological charge |m| = 1, 2. Under conditions of weak diffraction…
We investigate the interference of high-order perfect optical vortex (POV) beams with different topological charges. Through numerical simulations, we reveal a remarkable phenomenon: keeping the beam width, and beam radius fixed while…
This paper examines how best to associate quantum states of a single particle to different modes of a narrowly collimated beam of classical radiation modeled in the paraxial approximation. Our analysis stresses the importance of the…
The splitting of a high-order optical vortex into a constellation of unit vortices, upon total reflection, is described and analyzed. The vortex constellation generalizes, in a local sense, the familiar longitudinal Goos-H\"anchen and…
In this work, the paraxial approximation of the free Dirac equation is examined. The results are first obtained by constructing superpositions of exact solutions with suitable profiles, which are borrowed from paraxial optics. In this…
The paper aims at presenting a didactic and self-contained overview of Gauss-Hermite and Gauss-Laguerre laser beam modes. The usual textbook approach for deriving these modes is to solve the Helmoltz electromagnetic wave equation within the…
We overcome the diffraction limit in fluorescence imaging of neutral atoms in a sparsely filled one-dimensional optical lattice. At a periodicity of 433 nm, we reliably infer the separation of two atoms down to nearest neighbors. We observe…
We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that the propagation of optical vortices in free space can be analysed by using the width ($w(z)$) of the host Gaussian beam and the inner and outer radii of the vortex beam at the source…
Vortex states of photons, electrons, and other particles are wave packets that carry intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) and exhibit other features unavailable for plane waves. Collisions of high-energy vortex states can become a…