Talbot effect with partially coherent interfering Bessel beams.

Abstract

We studied the free-space propagation of interfering partially coherent Bessel beams. The partially coherent superimposed Bessel beams were generated by diffracting a spatially incoherent light by two concentric circular slits. We observed a Talbot effect in the random intensity pattern and in the intensity correlation. We showed that the Talbot length depends only on the radii of the circular slits. We explained this effect on the basis of the plane-wave decomposition of spatially random fields.