Chien-Yuan HAN^*, Ruey-Shyan CHANG, and Hai-Fong CHEN

Department of Electro-Optical Engineering, National United University, Miaoli 360, Taiwan

(Received August 15, 2012; Revised December 24, 2012; Accepted December 25, 2012)

We demonstrated the generation of a cylindrical vector laser beam using a pentaprism interferometer. The solid-state interferometer was made up of a trapezoid and right-angle prism, whose hypotenuse face was implemented with a polarization beam splitter coating that split a rotated TEM₀₁ mode beam into two orthogonal polarizations. The P-polarized beam was reflected inside the prism twice, allowing a mode pattern without inversion; however, the S-polarized beam was reflected once resulting in mode patterns that form P-polarized beams rotated by 90°. We also held the phase shift of the two beams to zero by use of a phase shifter, thus the output of the superimposed beam was a radially polarized beam. We demonstrated the mode pattern and polarization purity of the output beam through the use of this configuration.

Key words: cylindrical vector beam, interferomtery, pentaprism