Affiliation:
1. Universidade Federal Fluminense
2. Instituto Federal Fluminense
Abstract
Interference is the mechanism through which waves can be structured into the most fascinating patterns. While for sensing, imaging, trapping, or in fundamental investigations, structured waves play nowadays an important role and are becoming the subject of many interesting studies. Using a coherent optical field as a probe, we show how to structure light into distributions presenting collapse and revival structures in its wavefront. These distributions are obtained from the Fourier spectrum of an arrangement of aperiodic diffracting structures. Interestingly, the resulting interference may present quasiperiodic structures of diffraction peaks on a number of distance scales, even though the diffracting structure is not periodic. We establish an analogy with revival phenomena in the evolution of quantum mechanical systems and illustrate this computation numerically and experimentally, obtaining excellent agreement with the proposed theory.
Funder
Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico
Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia de Informação Quântica
Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Subject
Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics