Fields of a radially polarized laser beam developed recently [Y. I. Salamin, Opt. Lett.31, 2619 (2006)] are employed to show that electrons produced by atomic ionization near the focus may be accelerated to GeV energies. Conditions for producing a mono-energetic and well-collimated electron beam are discussed.

We present a novel approach to generating radially and azimuthally polarized vector beams that utilize an interferometer constructed from two identical diffractive optical elements. The measured polarization properties of four vector beam states and their phase relationships are in good agreement with theoretical expectations. This interferometer is passively phase stable and robust, making it ...

We present a method for the generation of high kinetic energy attosecond electron packets via magnetostatic and aperture filtering of conical surface plasmon (SP) accelerated electrons. The conical SP waves are excited by coupling an ultrafast radially polarized laser beam to a conical silica lens coated with an Ag film. Electromagnetic and particle tracking models are employed to characterize ...

On the basis of a formal analogy with the irradiance moments, analytical definitions are proposed for the width of both the transverse and the longitudinal component of rotationally-symmetric radially-polarized fields at the focal plane of a high-focusing optical system. The beam width of the whole field is also introduced. The transverse beam size is thus associated with the overall spatial st...

KORBINIAN J. KALTENECKER,* JACOB C. KÖNIG-OTTO, MARTIN MITTENDORFF, STEPHAN WINNERL, HARALD SCHNEIDER, MANFRED HELM, HANSPETER HELM, MARKUS WALTHER, AND BERND M. FISCHER French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis, 5, Rue du Général Cassagnou 68301, Saint-Louis, France Institute of Physics, University of Freiburg, Hermann-Herder-Strasse 3, 79104 Freiburg, Germany Freiburg Materials Research...

Analytic expressions for the fields of a tightly focused radially polarized Gaussian laser beam are derived, accurate to epsilon5, where epsilon is the associated diffraction angle. The fields satisfy Maxwell's equations, and the calculated beam power based on them is significantly different from that of the paraxial-approximation fields.