Anomalous transient behavior from an inhomogeneous initial optical vortex density

Abstract

Inhomogeneous optical vortex densities can be produced in stochastic optical fields by a combination of coherent and incoherent superposition of speckle fields. During subsequent propagation, the inhomogeneity in the vortex density decays away. However, the decay curves contain oscillatory features that are counterintuitive: for a short while, the inhomogeneity actually increases. The author provides numerical simulations and analytic calculations to study the appearance of the anomalous features in the decay curves.