Enhancing the Self-Healing Ability of a Partially Coherent Airy Beam via Fourier Processing: Numerical Investigation

Abstract

Almost all of the beams under propagation are believed to suffer severe distortion when the source coherence deteriorates, due to the optical diffraction. This implies that low-coherence beams have poor self-healing ability, but were found to be robust against the turbulence, distortion, scattering, etc. In this letter, we first prove numerically that partially coherent Airy beams (PCABs), generated via Fourier processing, have better self-healing ability than that of conventional fully coherent Airy beams. Moreover, as the source coherence deteriorates and the propagation distance increases, the self-healing ability is found to increase. We believe that such PCABs may find Airy beam-related applications in adverse environments, such as particle trapping in biological tissues.