Tailoring the longitudinal electric fields of high-order laser beams and their direct verification in three dimensions

We demonstrate the tailoring of longitudinal electric fields that arise from tight focusing of spatially phase-shaped high-order laser beams, and verify their spatial distribution in three dimensions. To tailor the three-dimensional (3D) spatial distribution of longitudinal electric fields, we precisely control the relative phase delay between the two lobes of a HG10 laser beam using a spatial light modulator (SLM) before tight focusing. To verify the longitudinal electric fields in the focal volume, we employ 3D microscopic mapping of second-harmonic generation (SHG) from a single semiconductor nanowire that is extremely sensitive to the orientation of the longitudinal electric field. The technique is direct, general and expected to be useful in harnessing and in probing longitudinal electric fields with arbitrary spatial intensity distributions in the 3D focal volume.