  Local shaping of the polarization state of a light beam is appealing for a
number of applications. This can be achieved by employing devices containing
birefringent materials. In this article, we present one such device that
permits one to convert a uniformly circularly polarized beam into a cylindrical
vector beam (CVB). This device has been fabricated by exploiting the POLICRYPS
photocuring technique. It is a liquid-crystal-based optical diffraction grating
featuring polar symmetry of the director alignment. We have characterized the
resulting CVB profile and polarization for the cases of left and right
circularly polarized incoming beams.
