  We present a novel family of paraxial optical beams having a confluent
hypergeometric transverse profile, which we name hypergeometric Gauss modes of
type-II (HyGG-II). These modes are eigenmodes of the photon orbital angular
momentum and they have the lowest beam divergence at waist of HyGG-II among all
known finite power families of paraxial modes. We propose to exploit this
feature of HyGG-II modes for generating, after suitable focusing, a "light
needle" having record properties in terms of size and aspect ratio, possibly
useful for near-field optics applications.
