title: Poincaré-beam patterns produced by nonseparable superpositions of Laguerre-Gauss and polarization modes of light.
abstract: We present a study of Poincaré-beam polarization patterns produced by collinear superposition of two Laguerre-Gauss spatial modes in orthogonal polarization eigenstates (circular or linear). We explore theoretically and experimentally the combinations that are possible. We find that the resulting patterns can be explained in terms of mappings of points on the Poincaré sphere onto points in the transverse plane of the beam mode. The modes that we produced yielded many types of polarization singularities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York 13346, USA. egalvez@colgate.edu
authors.forename: Enrique J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Galvez
authors.forename: Shreeya
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Khadka
authors.forename: William H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Schubert
authors.forename: Sean
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nomoto