Wavefront manipulation of tightly focused cylindrical vector beams and its applications

As one of the most fundamental properties of light fields, polarization has attracted immense attentions from researchers. Controlling the polarization states of light fields is of vital significance in the interactions between light fields and materials. Under tightly focused conditions, wavefront manipulation of vector beams introduces flexible and controllable amplitude, phase and polarization distributions into their focal fields, and hence diversifies the interactions between light fields and materials. In this paper, the latest progresses and developments of wavefront manipulation of tightly focused cylindrical vector beams are reviewed. Polarization properties, generation methods, and the applications of tightly focused cylindrical light fields including generations of far-field sub-diffraction focal spots, opto-magnetic recording, detections of single-molecule/particle orientations, generations of arbitrary 3D polarization states, high-density data storage, information encryption, and reconstruction of vectorial wavefronts are concretely reviewed.