Self-healing in scaled propagation invariant beams

Abstract

We analyze and demonstrate, numerically and experimentally, the self-healing effect in scaled propagation invariant beams, subject to opaque obstructions.We introduce the signal to noise intensity ratio, a semi-analytical figure of merit, explicitly dependent on the features of the beams and the obstructions applied to them. The effect is quantitatively evaluated employing the Root Mean Square deviation and the similarity function.