Polarization of a light beam is traditionally studied under the hypothesis that the state of polarization is uniform across the transverse section of the beam. In such a case, if the paraxial approximation is also assumed, the propagation of the beam reduces to a scalar problem. Over the last few decades, light beams with spatially variant states of polarization have attracted great attention, due mainly to their potential use in applications such as optical trapping, laser machining, nanoscale imaging, polarimetry, etc. In this tutorial, an introductory treatment of non-uniformly totally polarized beams is given. Besides a brief review of some useful parameters for characterizing the polarization distribution of such beams across transverse planes, from both local and global points of view, several methods for generating them are described. It is expected that this tutorial will serve newcomers as a starting point for further studies on the subject.

中文翻译：

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非均匀全偏振光束的合成和表征：教程。

传统上，在这样的假设下研究光束的偏振：在光束的整个横截面上偏振状态是均匀的。在这种情况下，如果还假设采用近轴近似，则光束的传播将减少为标量问题。在过去的几十年中，偏振态在空间上处于变化状态的光束引起了极大的关注，这主要是由于其在光学陷波，激光加工，纳米级成像，偏振计等应用中的潜在用途。在本教程中，对光束的介绍性处理给出了非均匀全偏振光束。除了从局部和全局的角度简要回顾了一些有用的参数以表征这种光束在横向平面上的偏振分布外，还描述了几种生成它们的方法。