Generation of highly confined optical bottle beams by exploiting the photonic nanojet effect

We report on the generation of photonic nanojets, which resemble optical bottle beams. They are realized by manipulating the illumination of dielectric microspheres. As illumination we use the outer region of deliberately truncated Bessel-Gauss beam or a focused Gaussian beam with intentionally induced spherical aberrations. For the Bessel-Gauss beam possessing a single side lobe only, the nanojet spot resembles an optical bottle beam with a strong confinement due to the nanojet effect. When multiple side lobes of the aberrated focal spot are used, a chain of 3D optical bottle beams appears. We show the 3D intensity distributions close to the spot and discuss the main characteristics of such optical bottle beams.