Cylindrically polarized Bessel-Gauss beams

Abstract

We present a study of radially and azimuthally polarized Bessel-Gauss beams in both the paraxial and nonparaxial regimes. We discuss the validity of the paraxial approximation and the form of the nonparaxial corrections for Bessel-Gauss beams. We show that, independently from the ratio between the Bessel aperture cone angle ${\vartheta }_0$ and the Gauss beam divergence ${\theta }_0$, the nonparaxial corrections are always very small and therefore negligible. Explicit expressions for the nonparaxial vector electric field components are also reported.