ifornia) 2002  Chap. 8. Fig. 3. Calculated and experimental Stokes parameters and the state of polarization of amplified combination of radially and azimuthally polarized beam. (a) Calculated results; (b) experimental results. Fig. 4. Experimental cross-sections of the far-field inten- sity distributions of the amplified radially polarized light beam with and without conversion to a linearly polarized near Gaussian beam. Solid (blue) curve - before conver- sion; dashed (red) curve - after conversion. Left inset depicts the far field intensity distribution before conver- sion and right inset the far field intensity distribution after conversion. (a) (b) S$_{0}$ S$_{0}$ S$_{1}$ S$_{1}$ S$_{2}$ S$_{2}$ 10 20 30 40 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 x [ m] Intensity [a.u] 6. R. Oron  S. Blit  N. Davidson  A. A. Friesem  Z. Bomzon  and E. Hasman. Appl. Phys. Lett.   77   3322  (2000). 7. T. Grosjean  D. Courjon and M. Spajer. Opt. Comm.   203   1  (2002). 8. N. Heckenberg  R. McDuff  C. Smith  and A. White. Opt. Lett.   17   221  (1992). 9. J. -L. Li  K. -I. Ueda  M. Musha  A. Shirakawa  and Z. -X. Zhang. Opt. Lett.   31   2969  (2006). 10. J. -L. Li  K. -I. Ueda  M. Musha  A. Shirakawa  and Z. -X. Zhang. Opt. Lett.   32   1360  (2007). 11. A. V. Nesterov and V. G. Niziev. J. Phys. D:Appl. Phys.   33   1817  (2000). 12. K. Venkatakrishnan and B. Tan. J. of MicroMech. and MicroEng.   16   2603  (2006). 13. G. P. Agrawal  ”Fiber-Optics Communicatio Systems” (A Wiley interscience publication  John Wiley and Sons) 1997  Chap. 2. 14. G. Volpe and D. Petrov. Opt. Comm.   237   89  (2004). 15. E.Hecht  ”Optics” (Addison Wesley  San Francisco  Cal- 3