Abstract
In a previous Letter [Opt. Lett. 40, 1900 (2015) [CrossRef] ], we asserted that two counter-propagating beams must be polarized with opposite handedness to cancel scattering forces. A more careful calculation shows that this is not the case. The correct condition is achieved by beams with the same handedness, as derived in this Erratum.
© 2016 Optical Society of America
In a previous Letter [1], we asserted in the paragraph following Eq. (16) that “if beam 1 is collimated and everywhere circularly polarized, then beam 2 must also be circularly polarized, but with the opposite handedness.” A more careful application of Eq. (16) in [1] shows that this is not the case.
Circular polarization across paraxial input beam 1 can be described by , where is a real-valued scalar function that determines the amplitude across the beam, and is a real-valued scalar. Applying Eq. (16) in [1] gives the solution for beam 2:
where , represents an element-wise multiplication, indicates the complex conjugate, and takes a value between 0 and . Clearly, the solution for beam 2 is polarized identically to beam 1.Thus, if beam 1 is collimated and everywhere circularly polarized, then beam 2 must also be circularly polarized with the same handedness. This also implies that Fig. 2(b) in [1] is incorrect: the two circular arrows should be identical, as shown in Fig. 1. These errors affect neither the derivations of any equations nor the main conclusions given in [1].
REFERENCE
1. S. Divitt, L. Rondin, and L. Novotny, Opt. Lett. 40, 1900 (2015). [CrossRef]