Lateral diffusion of the topological charge density in stochastic optical fields

Abstract

Stochastic (i.e. random and quasi-random) optical fields may contain distributions of optical vortices that are represented by non-uniform topological charge densities. Numerical simulations are used to investigate the evolution under free-space propagation of topological charge densities that are inhomogeneous along one dimension. It is shown that this evolution is described by a diffusion process that has a diffusion parameter which depends on the propagation distance.