Characterization and manipulation of full Poincare beams on the hybrid Poincare sphere

We develop a hybrid Poincare sphere to characterize the so-called full Poincare beam with any polarization geometry. The two eigenstates of the hybrid Poincare sphere are defined as a fundamental-mode Gaussian beam and a Laguerre-Gaussian beam. We further establish a robust and efficient experimental setup to generate any desired full Poincare beam on the hybrid Poincare sphere via modulating the incident polarization state of light. Our research provides an alternative way for describing and manipulating the full Poincare beam and an effective method to control the polarization state of light. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America