Alexander Dreischuh is a physicist associated with the Department of Quantum Electronics at Sofia University. His author-hosted curriculum vitae records a professorship there beginning in 2004.[ref] His publication list documents experimental and theoretical work in nonlinear optics and structured light, including joint work with Lyubomir Stoyanov and Gerhard G. Paulus.
A useful theme is that an optical field has a spatial wave phase as well as a light intensity. An optical vortex has a phase singularity around which the wave phase winds. In an original local model , with integer and vanishing central amplitude when , a complete circuit changes the continuous phase by . The optical vortex charge is therefore ; gives a phase winding. The visible dark center alone does not determine the sign or magnitude of that winding.
Dreischuh coauthored the 2023 comparison of Gouy phase theory with measurements on Bessel-Gaussian beams. One apparatus used a 532 nm laser, two spatial light modulators, a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and a rail-mounted camera behind the focusing lens.[ref]
Gouy phase of Bessel-Gaussian beams: theory vs. experiment by Lyubomir Stoyanov and others. p.13691, Figure 3(a) and caption
The apparatus separates preparation from diagnosis: a spatial light modulator controls an optical field's spatial structure, while interference with a reference converts phase differences into recorded intensity fringes. Changing the longitudinal camera position tests propagation through and beyond the focus. That makes the observed phase evolution a quantitative experimental question rather than something inferred solely from a single ring-shaped intensity image.
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