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.

Multiplicative electronic speckle-pattern interferometry fringes.

A theoretical analysis of fringe patterns and its experimental corroboration obtained by multiplication of two speckled images with electronic speckle-pattern interferometry (ESPI) are reported. A specifically designed digital filter is used to enhance the contrast and visibility of the inherently noisy multiplication fringes. Phase retrieval is achieved by a phase-stepping technique. Experimental results are presented for the in-plane-sensitive optical ESPI setup; however, out-of-plane and shearing setups may be used as well. The method represents an alternative to the subtraction and addition techniques in ESPI.