Self-healing property of a caustic optical beam.
It is well known that Bessel beams and the other families of propagation-invariant optical fields have the property of self-healing when obstructed by an opaque object. Here it is shown that there exists another kind of field distribution that can have an analog property. In particular, we demonstrate that a class of caustic wave fields, whose transverse intensity patterns change on propagation, when perturbed by an opaque object can reappear at a further plane as if they had not been obstructed. The physics of the phenomenon is fully explained and shown to be related to that of self-healing propagation invariant optical fields.
Centro de Investigaciones en Optica, A.C. Lomas del Bosque No 115, Col Lomas del Campestre León, Guanajuato, México 37150. anguiano@cio.mx
Marcelino
M
Anguiano-Morales
Amalia
A
Martínez
M David
MD
Iturbe-Castillo
Sabino
S
Chávez-Cerda
N
N
Alcalá-Ochoa