Optical diabols in singular laser beams

Polarisation singularities and optical diabols in laser beams are studied experimentally by the developed method of digital Stokes-polarimetry. Three possible morphological forms of singularities with circular polarisation (C points) are found and their statistics in the speckle pattern of photoinduced scattering is determined. Singular fields with controllable parameters are realised and used for studying topological transformations, creation and annihilation of singularities and optical diabols. Both possible types of distributions of the major and minor semiaxes of polarisation ellipses in the beam cross section around C points (optical diabols) are measured. It is shown that, in accordance with the theory, the annihilation of pairs of elliptical diabols is preceded by their transformation to hyperbolic diabols.