Tightly focused light beams can exhibit electric fields spinning around any
axis including the one transverse to the beams' propagation direction. At
certain focal positions, the corresponding local polarization ellipse can
degenerate into a perfect circle, representing a point of circular
polarization, or C-point. We consider the most fundamental case of a linearly
polarized Gaussian beam, where - upon tight focusing - those C-points created
by transversely spinning fields can form the center of 3D optical polarization
topologies when choosing the plane of observation appropriately. Due to the
high symmetry of the focal field, these polarization topologies exhibit non
trivial structures similar to M\"obius strips. We use a direct physical measure
to find C-points with an arbitrarily oriented spinning axis of the electric
field and experimentally investigate the fully three-dimensional polarization
topologies surrounding these C-points by exploiting an amplitude and phase
reconstruction technique.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; additional supplementary materials with 4 pages,
3 figure
