학술논문
Non-Diffracting Polarisation Features around Far-Field Zeros of Electromagnetic Radiation
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
Language
Abstract
Light from any physical source diffracts over space, as spherical wavefronts grow and energy density is spread out. Diffractive effects pose fundamental limits to light-based technologies, including communications, spectroscopy, and metrology. Polarisation becomes paraxial in the far field limit and, by ignoring longitudinal field components, the rich physics of non-paraxial fields which exist in near-fields or a beam's tight focus are lost. The longitudinal field cannot, however, be ignored when transverse field components vanish (in a transverse field zero) and carry a small non-paraxial region to infinity. We show that a transverse field zero is always accompanied by non-diffracting polarisation structures, whose geometries are independent of the distance to the source, including an enclosing intensity ratio tube, and parallel, non-diverging polarisation singularities. We illustrate these features in multipole radiation and in double slit interference, two examples which have time-fixed transverse field zeros. Non-diffracting structures with changing position are coupled to time-varying zeros, which are present in all far field radiation.
Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; journal version
Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; journal version