Complete shaping of optical vector beams.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate the complete and simultaneous modulation of the amplitude, phase and arbitrary state of polarization of optical beams. Based on a 4-f system including a spatial light modulator (SLM), two orthogonally polarized beams serving as the base vector components are produced by a computer generated hologram. The complex amplitude of orthogonal components is realized by a macro-pixel encoding technique purposely designed for phase-only SLMs. Vector beams can be created from the coaxial superposition of the two base beams. This enables us to design optical fields with arbitrarily structured amplitude, phase and polarization by using only one SLM, and thus provides an easy-to-implement route for exploring the novel effects and expanding the functionality of vector beams with space-variant parameters.