Light beams with a dark hollow spatial intensity profile are of considerable interest due to their wide range of potential applications. In particular, hollow Gaussian beams are expected to be useful for tasks such as particle trapping and free-space optical communication. Now, researchers at Soochow University in China have theoretically proposed and experimentally demonstrated a simple and convenient method for generating such beams. It involves using a spiral phase plate to convert a Laguerre–Gaussian beam into a hollow Gaussian beam. The team obtained reasonable agreement between experimental measurements and theoretical calculations for the focusing properties of their generated beams.
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Pleasants, S. Hollow Gaussian beams. Nature Photon 8, 423 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2014.128
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2014.128
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