Van Zandt Noah R, Spencer Mark F, Steinbock Michael J, Anderson Brian M, Hyde Milo W, Fiorino Steven T
Appl Opt. 2018 May 20;57(15):4103-4110. doi: 10.1364/AO.57.004103.
Polychromatic laser light can reduce speckle noise in many wavefront-sensing and imaging applications. To help quantify the achievable reduction in speckle noise, this study investigates the accuracy of three polychromatic wave-optics models under the specific conditions of an unresolved object. Because existing theory assumes a well-resolved object, laboratory experiments are used to evaluate model accuracy. The three models use Monte-Carlo averaging, depth slicing, and spectral slicing, respectively, to simulate the laser-object interaction. The experiments involve spoiling the temporal coherence of laser light via a fiber-based, electro-optic modulator. After the light scatters off of the rough object, speckle statistics are measured. The Monte-Carlo method is found to be highly inaccurate, while depth-slicing error peaks at 7.8% but is generally much lower in comparison. The spectral-slicing method is the most accurate, always producing results within the error bounds of the experiment.
