Generation of cylindrical vector beams with few-mode fibers excited by Laguerre-Gaussian beams

We propose a novel method to efficiently produce light beams with radial, azimuthal, and hybrid polarization, through a few-mode fiber excited by a Laguerre-Gaussian beam. With different input polarization we can selectively excite different combinations of modes from the LP11 group. We propose to show how to transform the output beam into a cylindrical vector beam in free-space through various polarization transformations. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.