Noise is an unavoidable feature in most optical systems and many techniques exist to minimize its adverse effects. In this regard, spatial filtering is a commonly deployed technique to improve the quality of laser beams by optically filtering the noise. In the “textbook” example, the noise is usually assumed to be high frequency and the laser beam, Gaussian. In this case, the filtering is achieved by a simple pinhole placed at the common focal plane of two lenses. In this work, we describe how this process can be generalized to arbitrary beam profiles: spatial filtering of complex light.
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