Design of cylindrical vector beams based on the rotating Glan polarizing prism.

Recently the cylindrically polarized beams have been gained highly attention in the fields of particle manipulation, material processing, nanoscale imaging, etc. So the methods to create the cylindrically polarized beams become more important. Here, based on the principle of the Glan polarizing prism, we design two types of the structures of the cylindrical polarization analyzer that can convert directly a linearly or circularly polarized beam into various cylindrical vector beams. The key optical element in the cylindrical polarization analyzer is the cylindrical polarizing prism with unique structure. We demonstrate the operating principle and the feasibility of the fabrication of the cylindrical polarization analyzer in detail. Analyses show that the cylindrical polarization analyzer designed by us not only have novel structures and excellent characteristics, such as the compact and stabile structures, high extinction ratio, high polarization purity, no requirements on the mode and the wavelength of the incident light (only for the first type), not changing the intensity distribution of the incident light, and easily integrated into the optical systems, but also is easy to be fabricated, especially for the second type.