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Neglecting the electric field component along the light's propagationdirection is a common practice, known as paraxial approximation. However,experimental evidence and theory on the head-on excitation of atoms byLaguerre-Gaussian beams reveal that the full vector character of the lightfield has to be taken into account. Optical vortices are a large family offields, being Laguerre-Gaussian only one particular case. Now we extend thestudy of the applicability of the paraxial approximation to a broader set ofoptical vortices by considering the interaction of atoms with generalizedLaguerre-Gaussian and generalized Bessel beams. We demonstrate that all vortexbeams here considered look the same close to the beam axis, where the atom isplaced. From this, we conclude that the paraxial approximation fails for thelarge set of vortex beams, and that a full understanding of the interaction ofoptical vortices with atoms requires the inclusion of all vector components ofthe electric field.

The paraxial approximation fails to describe the interaction of atoms with general vortex light fields