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Updated: Jun 19, 2026

The Generation of Higher-order Laguerre-Gauss Optical Beams for High-precision Interferometry
Published on: August 12, 2013
Adaptive Laguerre-Gaussian variant of the Gaussian beam expansion method
Emmanuel Cagniot1, Michael Fromager, Kamel Ait-Ameur
1Centre de recherche sur les Ions, les Matériaux et la Photonique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 6252, Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Ingénieurs de Caen, Université de Caen, 6 Bd Maréchal Juin, F-14050 Caen, France. Emmanuel.Cagniot@ensicaen.fr
Abstract:
A variant of the Gaussian beam expansion method consists in expanding the Bessel function J0 appearing in the Fresnel-Kirchhoff integral into a finite sum of complex Gaussian functions to derive an analytical expression for a Laguerre-Gaussian beam diffracted through a hard-edge aperture. However, the validity range of the approximation depends on the number of expansion coefficients that are obtained by optimization-computation directly. We propose another solution consisting in expanding J0 onto a set of collimated Laguerre-Gaussian functions whose waist depends on their number and then, depending on its argument, predicting the suitable number of expansion functions to calculate the integral recursively.
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