Exact analysis of the effects of sampling of the scalar diffraction field

If the sampled diffraction pattern due to a planar object is used to reconstruct the object pattern by backpropagation, the obtained pattern is no longer the same as the original. The effect of such sampling on the reconstruction is analyzed. The formulation uses the plane-wave expansion, and therefore the provided solution is exact for wave propagation in media where scalar wave propagation is valid. In contrast to the sampling effects under the Fresnel approximation, the exact solution indicates that there are no modulated replicas of the original object in the reconstructed pattern. Rather, the distortion is in the form of modulated, translated, and dispersed versions of the original. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America