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.

References in corpus (6)

• Quantifying Entanglement
• Nonparaxial Mathieu and Weber accelerating beams
• Renyi-Wehrl entropies as measures of localization in phase space
• Wave-optics description of self-healing mechanism in Bessel beams
• Distance-based degrees of polarization for a quantum field
• Self-healing in scaled propagation invariant beams

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Self-healing of structured light: a review
• Recovery of local entanglement in self-healing vector vortex Bessel beams
• Orbital angular momentum and informational entropy in perturbed vortex beams
• Revealing the modal content of obstructed beams
• Structured light beams constituted of incoming and outgoing waves