Demagnifying a distant diffraction pattern
ID: demagnifying-a-distant-diffraction-pattern
A thin lens placed immediately after an aperture can reproduce its free-propagated pattern from distance L on a nearer screen d if . In the paraxial Fresnel integral, the lens changes the aperture's quadratic propagation phase from to . The cross term then matches free propagation at the old-screen coordinate . Intensities have the same shape under transverse scale d/L, with an overall brightness factor in a lossless lens of sufficient aperture. For a narrow uniformly illuminated slit, the far-field first-zero estimate on the new screen is .
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