Effect of Aberrations on Tightly Focused Cylindrical Vector beams

Abstract

Cylindrical vector beams have axially symmetric polarization profiles or electric field orientations in the pupil plane. Two important members of cylindrical vector beams are the radially polarized and the azimuthally polarized beams. When a linearly polarized beam (polarized along X) is focused by an aplanatic lens system, in the low numerical aperture (NA) case, the focal volume is primarily X polarized and there is only a negligible amount of Z polarized component. Thus it had appeared to be