Cylindrical Vector Beam with Optical Vortices in a Q-switched Nd:GdVO4 Laser

Abstract

SUMMARY In the thesis we mainly use a birefringent laser crystal and an Acousto-Optic Modulator (AOM) along with a four-element cavity (The stable region (0 ? G1G2 ? 1) was calculated through ABCD Law for further cavity design) to generate cylindrical vector beams By adjusting output coupler’s position we can manipulate the output beam to be radially- or azimuthally-polarized Moreover Q-switched laser beams can be obtained by adding a 15 kHz square wave signal to the AOM The high percentages of DOP indicate that the output beams still maintain good polarization quality Next the beam quality factor M^2 was measured by beam profile and then the results of Mx^2 and My^2 were about 3 which is the theoretic value of LG01 mode The results brought us to the exploration of the vortex characteristics which were verified by the Mach-Zehnder interferometer We found out that whether the output beam was radially- or azimuthally-polarized beam the topological charges l were 1

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Ming-Dar Wei (Supervisor)