The extreme versatility of the internal conical refraction in biaxial crystals in the transformation of Gaussian laser beams is demonstrated and discussed. By means of simple variations in the focusing and polarization of the input beam, various beam configurations like Bessel–Gauss, Hermite–Gauss, Laguerre–Gauss, and others are shown to be produced from a lowest-order Gaussian beam passed through a biaxial crystal along one of its optical axes. Further transformations of the beam profile and formation of more complex light patterns were obtained in a cascaded scheme, when the beam was passed consecutively through two crystals. These observations, together with the known ability of conical refraction to form a variety of other complex light structures, demonstrate the unique properties of the effect in manipulations with the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light beams.

When a collimated light beam is passed consequently along the optic axes of two identical biaxial crystals, the conical refraction produces in the focal image plane a specific light pattern consisting of a ring and a central spot. The ring is formed due to the additive action of two crystals, while the spot results from the reversed conical refraction in such a degenerated cascade arrangement. The relative intensity of these two components depends on the azimuth angle between the orientations of the crystals about the beam axis. It is shown that this dependence arises due to the interference of pairs of waves produced by conical refraction in two crystals. If a part of these waves is blocked by polarization selection of beam components, the dependence of the light pattern on the azimuth angle vanishes. In this case, the outgoing light profile consists of a ring and a central spot with fixed intensities so that the total beam power is divided equally between these two components. Depending on the applied polarization, the central spot appears either as a restored input beam or a charge-two optical vortex. The results of numerical simulations of the effect are in a very good agreement with the experimental observations.

For a light beam focused through a biaxial crystal along one of its optical axes, the effect of internal conical refraction in the crystal leads to the formation in the focal image plane of two bright rings separated by a dark ring. It is shown that, with circularly polarized Laguerre-Gauss LG(0)(ℓ) beams entering the crystal, this classical double-ring pattern is transformed into a multiring one consisting of ℓ+2 bright rings.

The far-field pattern of Gaussian beams transformed by conical refraction in biaxial crystal is analyzed. It is shown that one of the two outgoing beam components acquires, under certain conditions, a profile with a dominating central peak. The width of this peak can be made significantly smaller than the width of the parent diffraction-limited Gaussian beam at the same propagation distance. The formation of such structurally-stable sub-diffraction beam core improves the beam directivity. Another component is a charge-one optical vortex, that forms the annular shell of the beam and carries the rest of the beam power.

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