Analytical expansion of highly focused vector beams into vector spherical harmonics and its application to Mie scattering

The analytical expansion of linearly, azimuthally, and radially polarized rigorous beam-type solutions of Maxwell's equations into vector spherical harmonics (VSHs) is presented. We report on the dominance of higher order multipoles in highly focused radially and azimuthally polarized beams compared to linearly polarized beams under similar conditions. Furthermore, we theoretically investigate a scenario in which highly focused azimuthally and radially polarized beams interact with a linear polarizer placed in the focal plane and expand the resulting fields into VSHs. The generalized Mie theory is used afterwards to investigate the scattering of the studied beams off a spherical gold nanoparticle