Optical systems and algorithms for phase-space tomography of one- and two-dimensional beams

Abstract

The application of partially coherent optical beams for imaging, free space communication, random medium analysis requires controlling its mutual intensity. This task can be done using the phase-space tomography method consisting on the reconstruction of the Wingner distribution (WD), and therefore the mutual intensity, from its projections associated with the fractional power spectra. We propose two schemes that apply spatial light modulators (SLMs) for the measurements of the required WD projections in the case of one- and two-dimensional optical signals. The use of the SLMs allows rapid data acquisitions and operative change of the projection number. Moreover, the measured intensity distributions do not require further rescaling, which accelerates the WD reconstruction algorithm and improves its efficiency. The developed numerical methods provide different ways for data analysis such as the reconstuction of the WD using the inverse Radon transform and its visualization for the case of one-dimensional signal; the determination of the mutual intensity for two fixed points without previous reconstruction of the entire WD for two-dimensional signal, ets. The validity of the proposed approaches has been verified experimentally for the test signals and results are in a good agreement with the numerical simulation.