Tailored light represents a fundamental tool for complex optical tweezing and micromanipulation. Despite many successful applications, there is still unexploited potential in fully structuring amplitude, phase and polarization. This is especially true if multiple spatial degrees of freedom are combined as e.g. the transverse plane as well as longitudinal extent, leading to three-dimensional (3d) volumes. This gives easy access to versatile features as spatio-temporal singularities or singularity networks in polarization landscapes. Within this contribution, we employ two fully-structured counter-propagating light fields to enable 3d beam shaping in amplitude, phase and polarization with a sub-wavelength resolution and a dynamic exchange between phase and polarization singularities upon propagation.
|