Cylindrical vector beam generation from a multi elliptical core optical fiber

Abstract

A method for the generation of cylindrical vector beams based on the design of a multicore optical fiber is presented. This design consists of N elliptical cores symmetrically arranged in a circular array about the fiber axis, where the orientation of each core's major axes has an azimuthally varying distribution. A cylindrically symmetric amplitude and polarization state is produced in the far field of the fiber output by the coherent superposition of the individual core outputs. Such a fiber with N=6 cores is fabricated and experimentally investigated. Numerical simulations show the dependence of the far field intensity of an array of Gaussian beamlets on the number of beamlets and their spacing in the array.