Study of the focused laser spots generated by various polarized laser beam conditions

Summary In this work, three-dimensional near-field imaging of the focused laser spot was studied theoretically and experimentally. In the theoretical simulation, we use the electromagnetic equivalent of the vectorial Kirchhoff diffraction integral to calculate the intensity distribution of the focal region, and a high depolarization is found in high numerical aperture systems (NA = 0.85). The experimental set-up is based on a near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM) system. A high-NA objective lens is used to focus incident light of various polarizations, and a tapered near-field optical fibre probe of the NSOM system is used to determine the intensity of the focal field. The results show an asymmetric distribution of the focused intensity with the linear polarized laser beam.