Production of high-order Bessel beams with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer

A new experimental setup is demonstrated to produce high-order Bessel beams. It is based on the field decomposition of the Bessel beam into its even and odd. field components. The implementation is performed over the spectral components with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer that synthesizes the components into the desired Bessel beam. The main advantage of our setup is that the required annular transmittances have only discrete phase changes of pi radians instead of a continuous change of phase. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.