Creation of flattop light field through tightly focusing of cylindrical vector beams

Recently, cylindrical vector beams have drawn considerable attention for their interesting properties and potential applications in super-resolution optical imaging, optical trapping and manipulating. It’s easy to obtain inhomogeneous status of polarization by designing the diffractive optical elements particularly. With the change of the polarization of cylindrical vector beams, three dimensional (3D) flattop fields could be obtained. Numerical analysis shows that the full width at half maximum of the proposed 3D flattop light field is nearly 5λ for axial distributions. The result shows a potential application of the cylindrical vector beams in laser beam shaping system and laser cutting.