Effect of object thickness on ultrashort pulse diffraction

When calculated in the spectral domain, the propagation of an ultrashort optical pulse may suffer from inaccuracy due to the finite thickness of the object it diffracts on. Unlike monochromatic radiation, ultrashort pulse interaction with an object in the time domain depends on the pulse longitudinal coordinate. Here, we propose an algorithm to study the effect of the object thickness on ultrashort pulse diffraction on amplitude, phase, and three-dimensional highly scattering objects. The algorithm comprises a stepwise approach to simulating the diffraction of ultrashort pulses on apertures or scatterers having a finite thickness. We confirm the applicability of the approach and convergence of the result upon reducing the simulation step. We compare the simulation results obtained with traditionally calculated wavefields and the updated results obtained with the proposed approach. We reveal a discrepancy of about 7% for pulsed radiation with lambda = 800 nm on a 1 mm thick object. Then, we demonstrate the dependence of this mismatch on the object thickness and show that for non-Gaussian vortex beams, this effect is even more pronounced. We reveal that spatiotemporal coupling effects depend on the pulse-object interaction simulation approach as well. The obtained results demonstrate that applicability of the single-layer representation of the simulated object strongly depends on its specific features, and inaccuracy of such an approach strongly depends on individual characteristics of the object. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America