Quasicontinuous pseudoimages in sinusoidal grating imaging using an extended light source

Abstract

When a polychromatic light illuminates a grating, an achromatic and continuous self-imaging regime is produced, what means that Talbot planes are eliminated. In this work, we investigate the existence of this continuous regime for generalized grating imaging. We have found that amplitude gratings with sinusoidal profiles may form, under monochromatic and partially coherent illumination, pseudoimages whose contrast or modulation present a smooth dependence on the gap between the two gratings.