Perfect optical coherence lattices

TL;DR

This paper presents a new method to generate perfect optical coherence lattices by structuring the amplitude and phase of partially coherent beams in a Fourier plane, enabling versatile lattice creation for optical engineering.

Contribution

The authors propose and experimentally demonstrate a protocol for creating perfect optical coherence lattices that depend solely on the degree of coherence of the input beam, independent of envelope modulation.

Findings

Successful experimental implementation of the lattice generation protocol.

Any partially coherent source can be used as input.

The method allows arbitrary lattice structures based on coherence manipulation.

Abstract

We advance and experimentally implement a protocol to generate perfect optical coherence lattices (OCL) that are not modulated by an envelope field. Structuring the amplitude and phase of an input partially coherent beam in a Fourier plane of an imaging system lies at the heart of our protocol. In the proposed approach, the OCL node profile depends solely on the degree of coherence (DOC) of the input beam such that, in principle, any lattice structure can be attained via proper manipulations in the Fourier plane. Moreover, any genuine partially coherent source can serve as an input to our lattice generating imaging system. Our results are anticipated to find applications to optical field engineering and multi-target probing among others.