Characterization of elliptic dark hollow beams

A dark hollow beam (DHB) is defined in general as a ringed shaped light beam with a null intensity center on the beam axis. DHBs have interesting physical properties such as a, helical wavefront, a center vortex singularity, doughnut-shaped transverse intensity distribution, they may carry and transfer orbital and spin angular momentum, and may also exhibit a nondiffracting behavior upon propagation. Most of the known theoretical models to describe DHBs consider axially symmetric transverse intensity distributions. However, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in developing models to describe DHBs with elliptic symmetry. DHBs with elliptic symmetry can be regarded as transition beams between circular and rectangular DHBs. For example, the high-order modes emitted from resonators with neither completely rectangular nor completely circular symmetry, but in between them, cannot be described by the known HermiteGaussian or LaguerreGaussian beams. In this work, we review the current state of research on elliptic DHBs, with particular emphasis in Mathieu and Ince-Gauss beams.