A fast, switchable electro-optic radial polarization retarder (EO-RPR) fabricated using the electro-optic ceramic PMN-PT is presented. This EO-RPR is useful for fast, switchable generation of pure cylindrical vector beam. When used together with a pa
ir of half-wave plates, the EO-RPR can change circularly polarized light into any cylindrical vector beam of interest such as radially or azimuthally polarized light. Radially and azimuthally polarized light with purities greater than 95% are generated experimentally. The advantages of using EO-RPR include fast response times, low driving voltage and transparency in a wide spectral range (500 -7000 nm).
We propose a robust spectral beam combining scheme using wavelength dependent polarisation rotators and polarization beam combiners. We successfully demonstrated the concept for two Yb-doped fiber lasers at 1064nm and 1092nm up to a total input power
of 90W. The results reveal a very good combining efficiency and the potential for scaling to high power operations in this method of beam combining.
We present a simple novel scheme that converts a Gaussian beam into an approximated radially polarized beam using coherent polarization manipulation together with Poynting walk-off in birefringent crystals. Our scheme alleviates the interferometric s
tability required by previous schemes that implemented this coherent mode summation using Mach-Zehnder-like interferometers. A symmetrical arrangement of two walk-off crystals with a half-wave plate, allows coherence control even when the laser has short temporal coherence length. We generated 14 watts of radially polarized beam from an Ytterbium fiber laser, only limited by the available fiber laser power.
