Poincare-beam patterns produced by nonseparable superpositions of Laguerre-Gauss and polarization modes of light

We present a study of Poincare-beam polarization patterns produced by collinear superposition of two Laguerre-Gauss spatial modes in orthogonal polarization eigenstates (circular or linear). We explore theoretically and experimentally the combinations that are possible. We find that the resulting patterns can be explained in terms of mappings of points on the Poincare sphere onto points in the transverse plane of the beam mode. The modes that we produced yielded many types of polarization singularities. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America