Unraveling beam self-healing
Abstract
We show that, contrary to popular belief, non only diffraction-free beams may reconstruct themselves after hitting an opaque obstacle but also, for example, Gaussian beams. We unravel the mathematics and the physics underlying the self-reconstruction mechanism and we provide for a novel definition for the minimum reconstruction distance beyond geometric optics, which is in principle applicable to any optical beam that admits an angular spectrum representation. Moreover, we propose to quantify the self-reconstruction ability of a beam via a newly established degree of self-healing. This is defined via a comparison between the amplitudes, as opposite to intensities, of the original beam and the obstructed one. Such comparison is experimentally accomplished by tailoring an innovative experimental technique based upon Shack-Hartmann wave front reconstruction. We believe that these results can open new avenues in this field.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1708.00175,
title = {Unraveling beam self-healing},
author = {Andrea Aiello and Girish S. Agarwal and Martin Paúr and Bohumil Stoklasa and Zdeněk Hradil and Jaroslav Řeháček and Pablo de la Hoz and Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.00175},
year = {2017}
}