Effects of a rectangular aperture on the vectorial structure of a Gaussian beam in the far-field regime

With the help of the angular spectrum representation and the Gaussian function expansions of the hard-edge aperture function, the vectorial structure of a linearly polarized Gaussian beam (GB) diffracted by a rectangular aperture is analyzed in detail. It is found that the sizes of the energy flux density spots and the energy fluxes of the TE and TM terms depend on the aperture configuration and the polarization direction of the incident GB. The far fields may have smaller spots and larger energy fluxes for a GB diffracted by a rectangular aperture compared to that by a square aperture with the same beam intensity. And another potential application in information encoding and transmission for free-space communications is also proposed in addition to re-focusing to enhance the optical storage density. This encoding scheme has the benefit of easy implementation without modulating any properties of the light source.