Saturable absorber nanolithography by vectorial nonparaxial Gaussian beam

Abstract

The non-paraxial and vectorial effects have an important role in the dynamics of highly confined beam in nonlinear medium. In this paper, we study the vectorial non-paraxial propagation of Gaussian field in the saturable absorber media numerically with the aim of nano-lithography. It is shown that in the optimal regimes for nanolithography, the mutual coupling between components of optical field and mode coupling between different orders of Hermite-Gaussian mode lead to generation of various patterns upon propagation through saturable absorber media. The vectorial effect is responsible for the symmetry breaking. For converging input beam, while the intense part of the beam goes toward the focal point, the low intensity parts of beam profile are eliminated. Finally, the Gaussian profile is recovered at the location of minimum spot size which is of the order of several tens of nanometer.