Resolving spatial modes of lasers via matrix completion

We explain a technique that recovers the structure and the modal weights of spatial modes of lasers from a limited number of spatial coherence measurements. Our approach interpolates the unobserved spatial coherence measurements via the low-rank matrix completion algorithm based on nuclear norm minimization and then extracts the set of modes via singular value decomposition. Numerical examples are provided on a variety of lasers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, and it is shown that the proposed method can further reduce the number of measurements by a factor of 2 for a moderate data size.