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Updated: Jul 29, 2026

The Generation of Higher-order Laguerre-Gauss Optical Beams for High-precision Interferometry
Published on: August 12, 2013
Intensity-based modal decomposition of optical beams in terms of Hermite-Gaussian functions
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. xxue@photonics.ece.mcgill.ca
Abstract:
We show that when an arbitrary optical beam is decomposed into a superposition of Hermite-Gaussian functions, it is sufficient to record a number of intensity profiles sampled at various transverse planes to uniquely determine the relative modal weights. This result follows from the parity relation and the nature of the Gouy phase, in addition to the orthogonality of the Fourier-transformed intensity profiles associated with the Hermite-Gaussian modes.
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