Phase measurements without interferometry: 2D transverse phase detection by numerical beam intensity analysis

Abstract

A whole family of laser-plasma interaction experiments is based on the phase analysis of the laser pulse after the propagation in a plasma. Typically, this phase is obtained by means of interferometry. As pulsed interferometry is a much more difficult task than taking simple images of the beam, we developed a numerical code for extracting phase information from images. The technique, based on the algorithm of Gerchberg–Saxton, showed to be very effective in retrieving 2D phase distributions of simulated as well as real beams. The convergence of the algorithm is fast (some minutes on a personal computer). The electronic noise in real images is intrinsically discarded by the algorithm.