Fig. 5: Knot propagation through multiple phase masks.
a Schematics of the simulated process. A knotted field is generated by a spatial light modulator (SLM)—the imaging system selecting the first diffraction order is omitted for simplicity—and sent through a free space channel with equally spaced phase masks. The distorted field is then captured by a second lens and reconstructed. The performed simulations, based on Zernike polynomial decomposition of Kolmogorov turbulence models (see text), show robustness for typical values of turbulence. b, c These show side and top views of a simulated cinquefoil knot propagated through 150 phase planes obtained as superposition of the first 54 Zernike polynomials (up to n = 10) with random coefficients extracted from a Gaussian distribution with width given by ref. 32, assuming r0 = 10 mm, R = 4w0.
