Interferometry-based modal analysis with finite aperture effects

TL;DR

This paper investigates how finite aperture effects influence interferometric modal analysis and proposes a reconstruction scheme that accounts for clipping, improving accuracy over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a clipping-aware modal reconstruction method for interferometry that enhances performance by considering practical aperture limitations.

Findings

Clipping-aware reconstruction outperforms traditional methods.

Finite aperture effects significantly impact interferometric modal analysis.

The proposed scheme improves modal content retrieval accuracy.

Abstract

We analyze the effects of aperture finiteness on interferograms recorded to unveil the modal content of optical beams in arbitrary basis using generalized interferometry. We develop a scheme for modal reconstruction from interferometric measurements that accounts for the ensuing clipping effects. Clipping-cognizant reconstruction is shown to yield significant performance gains over traditional schemes that overlook such effects that do arise in practice. Our work can inspire further research on reconstruction schemes and algorithms that account for practical hardware limitations in a variety of contexts.