Controlling the evolution of nondiffracting speckle by complex amplitude modulation on a phase-only spatial light modulator

In this work we investigate the structure of nondiffracting speckle fields, both experimentally and theoretically. We are able to produce very good agreement between the experimentally recorded and theoretically calculated fields by using complex amplitude modulation on a phase-only spatial light modulator to implement controlled ring-slit experiments for the generation of nondiffracting speckle fields. The structure of the nondiffracting speckle due to binary and continuous phase modulations for both a uniform and a normal distribution is investigated. We find that we are able to engineer whether the nondiffracting field will appear as speckle or a structured zero-order Bessel beam by adjusting the standard deviation in the distribution. Having the ability to control where in the spectrum, from fully-developed nondiffracting speckle to a symmetric zero-order Bessel beam, the nondiffracting field will exist can prove to be a useful resource in the non-destructive testing of materials. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.