Journal article
PARTIALLY COHERENT FIELDS, THE TRANSPORT-OF-INTENSITY EQUATION, AND PHASE UNIQUENESS
TE GUREYEV, A ROBERTS, KA NUGENT
JOURNAL OF THE OPTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA A-OPTICS IMAGE SCIENCE AND VISION | OPTICAL SOC AMER | Published : 1995
Abstract
Recent papers have shown that there are different coherent and partially coherent fields that may have identical intensity distributions throughout space. On the other hand, the well-known transport-of-intensity equation allows the phase of a coherent field to be recovered from intensity measurements, and the solution is widely held to be unique. A discussion is given on the recovery of the structure of both coherent and partially coherent fields from intensity measurements, and we reconcile the uniqueness question by showing that the transport-of-intensity equation has a unique solution for the phase only if the intensity distribution has no zeros. © 1995 Optical Society of America.