High-efficiency non-diffractive generator of arbitrary vectorial optical fields with minimal optical elements.

Tailoring electromagnetic waves has a wide range of applications, such as optical trapping, focus engineering, imaging, laser cutting, and optical communication. To do so, the spatial distribution of at least one of the four degrees of freedom of electromagnetic waves, amplitude, phase, polarization ratio, and retardance, must be modified. Arbitrary vectorial optical fields (VOF) can be engineered by spatially modulating all four degrees of freedom simultaneously. However, existing dynamic vectorial optical field generators (VOF-Gens) require intensive alignment and many optical elements in order to achieve high efficiency. Here, we design a dynamic VOF-Gen that can generate arbitrary VOFs using only five optical elements. Experimentally, we demonstrated an efficiency of 72%, the highest ever demonstrated.