Dynamic manipulation of nonlinear Talbot effect with structured light.

Abstract

The nonlinear Talbot effect has sparked considerable interest of researchers since it was proposed in recent years because it has many advantages compared with the Talbot effect in linear optics. In previous researches, such a nonlinear Talbot effect is only observed in nonlinear photonic crystals, which cannot dynamically manipulate in real time. Here, we report and experimentally demonstrate the high efficiency and dynamic manipulation of such a nonlinear Talbot effect with structured light. Different from the previous scheme, the nonlinear self-imaging effect observed in our experiment originates from the spatial phase structure of the incident fundamental frequency light. In our experiments, integer and fractional second-harmonic Talbot self-imaging is observed. Our results not only extend a novel technique for dynamic manipulation of the nonlinear Talbot effects, but also may have potential applications in parallel optical lithography, optical imaging, and optical computing.