Far-field transform. For transverse aperture scale and screen distance , the quadratic phase across the aperture is negligible when , equivalently a small Fresnel number up to geometrical factors. Expanding the source-to-screen distance at transverse screen coordinate gives
Dropping the final aperture-dependent term and treating the prefactor as constant gives
Thus intensity is the modulus squared of the aperture Fourier transform. A lens focal plane supplies the same angular transform without a very distant screen. The infinitely extended vertical dimension is treated per unit vertical extent.
half-slit phase-reversal diffraction. Put on the left half and on the right half. With and ,
Therefore
The apparent singularity at zero angle is removable: , so the centre is dark. Normalizing by the uncoated slit's on-axis intensity gives . Noncentral zeros have , or . The two largest lobes are symmetric, at the first nonzero root of , , giving when those directions propagate. Smaller lobes lie farther out under a decaying envelope.
Figure 1.
Original calculated half-slit phase-reversal pattern and its change when the phase-layer thickness is doubled
. Details.
Doubled thickness. Neglecting absorption and interface reflection, the phase delay doubles from to . Both halves then transmit with the same phase, recovering the ordinary single-slit pattern
It has a bright centre and first zeros at . The phase layer redistributes transmitted power rather than absorbing it in this idealization.