(Revised)Anomalous spectral behavior near phase singularities in diffraction of pulsed LG beams.docVIP

Anomalous spectral behavior near phase singularities in diffraction of pulsed Laguerre-Gaussian beams Qihui Zou and Baida Lü Institute of Laser Physics Chemistry, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610064, China Abstract The spectral anomalies near phase singularities of diffracted pulsed Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams in the far field are studied. It is shown that the spectral switch appears at the critical diffraction angle θc, which coincides with the point of the phase singularity of a certain frequency component near the carrier frequency. The beam order p, pulse duration T and truncation parameter δ affect the spectral behavior of diffracted pulsed LG beams in the far field. The potential application of the spectral anomalies of ultrashort pulsed beams in the information encoding and transmission is also discussed. Key words: Pulsed Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam, spectral anomaly, phase singularity, aperture diffraction, far field Introduction It is known that the phase becomes undetermined at points of zero intensity of certain frequency components. The study of the structure of the field near phase singularities has developed to a new branch of physical optics called singular optics [1]. Recently, the topic of singular optics has been extended from monochromatic wave fields to polychromatic ones, and the anomalous behavior of spectra near phase singularities in spatially fully and partially coherent, polychromatic beams has been studied theoretically in a number of papers [2-11] and has been verified experimentally [12-14]. In particular, Foley and Wolf pointed out that the phenomenon of spectral switches belongs to a new effect in singular optics [4]. However, most of the studies in spectral anomalies have been focused on the polychromatic steady-state beams. The purpose of the present paper is to study spectral anomalies in diffraction of ultrashort pulsed beams. In Sec.2, we take the pulsed Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam as an example of ultrashort pulsed be