Structured light, which encompasses various spatial patterns of light like donuts or flower petals, is crucial for a myriad of applications from precise measurements to communication systems.
The many properties of light allow it to be manipulated and used for applications that range from very sensitive measurements to communications and intelligent ways to interrogate objects. A compelling degree of freedom is the spatial pattern, called structured light, which can resemble shapes such as donuts and flower petals. For instance, patterns with different numbers of petals can represent letters of the alphabet, and when observed on the other side, deliver the message.
Unfortunately, what makes these patterns sensitive for measurements also make them susceptible to unwanted environmental factors such as air turbulence, aberrated optics, stressed fibers, or biological tissues doing their own “patterning” and distorting the structure. Here the distorted pattern can deteriorate to the point that the output pattern looks nothing like the input, rendering them ineffective.
Conventional methods to correct this have needed one to reapply the same distortion—this can take the form of measuring the distorting and applying the reverse or reversing the distortion in the beam and resending it back into the aberration, allowing this to “undo” itself in the process.
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