Generation of volumetrically full Poincaré beams.

Optical communications, remote sensing, particle trapping, and high-resolution imaging are a few research areas that benefit from new techniques to generate structured light. We present a method of generating polarization-structured laser beams that contain both full and partial polarization states. We demonstrate this method by generating an optical beam that contains every state of partial and full polarization. We refer to this beam as a volumetrically full Poincaré beam to distinguish it from full Poincaré beams, which contain all states of full polarization only. In contrast to methods relying upon spatial coherence to generate polarization-structured beams with partial polarization, our method creates well-collimated beams by relying upon temporal coherence.

Suppression of Nonlinear Optical Rogue Wave Formation Using Polarization-Structured Beams.

A nonlinear self-focusing material can amplify random small-amplitude phase modulations present in an optical beam, leading to the formation of amplitude singularities commonly referred to as optical caustics. By imposing polarization structuring on the beam, we demonstrate the suppression of amplitude singularities caused by nonlinear self-phase modulation. Our results are the first to indicate that polarization-structured beams can suppress nonlinear caustic formation in a saturable self-focusing medium and add to the growing understanding of catastrophic self-focusing effects in beams containing polarization structure.

Quantum Nonlocal Aberration Cancellation.

Phase distortions, or aberrations, can negatively influence the performance of an optical imaging system. Through the use of position-momentum entangled photons, we nonlocally correct for aberrations in one photon's optical path by intentionally introducing the complementary aberrations in the optical path of the other photon. In particular, we demonstrate the simultaneous nonlocal cancellation of aberrations that are of both even and odd order in the photons' transverse degrees of freedom. We also demonstrate a potential application of this technique by nonlocally canceling the effect of defocus in a quantum imaging experiment and thereby recover the original spatial resolution.