Generic full-vector angular spectrum method for calculating diffraction of arbitrary electromagnetic fields

Abstract: Numerous vector angular spectrum methods have been presented to model the vectorial nature of diffractive electromagnetic field, facilitating optical field engineering in polarization-related and high numerical aperture systems. However, balancing accuracy and efficiency in state-of-the-art vector methods is challenging, especially with not well-defined incident fields. Here, we propose a full-vector angular spectrum method for accurate, efficient, robust diffraction computation, allowing truly arbitrary incidence by precisely modeling the projection rule among Cartesian polarization components. We address a prior oversight, that the longitudinal electric field's projection onto the diffracted field was insufficiently considered. Notably, our method inherently handles reflection and transmission at dielectric interfaces, which can be viewed as k-space filters. For rotationally symmetric system, it achieves unprecedented computation times of a few seconds, speeding up optical design via faster input-output mapping in optimization algorithms.