Spatial multiplexing for tailored fully-structured light

Abstract

Fully-structured light is an emerging approach to sculpt light in all its degrees of freedom, i.e. amplitude, phase and polarization with a high transverse resolution and complex modulation patterns. Such an attractive and versatile approach for advanced optical trapping or fabricating novel materials still poses fundamental as well as technical challenges. Though the implementation of spatial light modulators (SLMs) has opened up a promising path for this task, up to now, fully-structured light can only be achieved using interferometric methods, multiple SLMs, or split-screen techniques reducing spatial resolution. We present a sophisticated single-beam approach based on spatial multiplexing, which does not only allow joint customization of phase and polarization combined with natural and prospectively even on-demand amplitude modulation, but also ensures high spatial resolution by the use of a single standard SLM in the full-screen mode. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach realizing double phase modulated light fields, as well as first- and higher-order vector modes with additional global phase modulation and natural amplitude shaping. These findings open new perspectives to optically trap polarization-sensitive, i.e. magnetic particles and advance laser material machining in anisotropic, birefingent matter.