Conical Refraction in Biaxial Crystals

When circularly polarized light propagates through a biaxial crystal along one of its optic axes, the transmitted field evolves into a cone, a phenomenon which is known as conical refraction. Several applications have been developed based on this effect, such as Bessel beam generation and optical tweezers. With the fast-physical-optics simulation technology in VirtualLab Fusion, conical refraction from a KGd crystal is demonstrated.