GENERALIZED HERMITE BEAMS IN FREE-SPACE

We show that two familiar types of Gauss-Hermite light beams that cons erve their structure and change scale, while propagating in space, are a particular case of generalized Hermite beams. We also show that sep arate Gauss-Hermite modes can be effectively generated by phase elemen ts whose transmission function is equal to the signum function of the corresponding Hermite polynomial.