Optical beam generation via incoherent superposition of phases

Abstract

We developed a technique to generate beams via incoherent superposition of phases in computer generated holograms. This is done numerically by randomly removing some information in the phase function of one beam, and replacing these information losses with the phase of another beam. In our simulation, we synthesize two Laguerre-Gaussian beams with opposite topological charges, and we vary ratios of their phase functions in generating the superposed beam. The intensity profiles obtained using the technique were visually similar to results obtained through coherent superposition is done. We performed mode projection of the basis beams onto the propagated function in order to quantitatively measure the mode components of the superposed beam. The mode projection plots of the two different techniques reveal a relatively low deviation from each other. Thus, the incoherent superposition of phases can be used to generate coherent superposed beams without loss of information in the mode components, such as the orbital angular momentum (OAM) content of the beam.