#  Blocked, but not broken: self healing of Montgomery patterns 

 





July 26, 2026

 

 

In the latest publication from our group, Athena Xu and colleagues have experimentally demonstrated self-healing of the Montgomery pattern, showing that these self-imaging light fields can reconstruct themselves after passing through an obstruction. Published in *Optics Letters*, the work reveals a mechanism fundamentally distinct from conventional self-healing beams: because the Montgomery field revives only at discrete self-imaging planes, its recovery distance is quantized in integer multiples of the self-imaging period, rather than growing continuously with obstruction size.

This resilience strengthens the Montgomery pattern's prospects for simultaneous multiplane optical manipulation, light-sheet microscopy in scattering media, plane-selective control of neutral-atom arrays, and compact flat-optics beam shaping.

See the publication in [Optics Letters](https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.605394) and the related work on lensless focusing from [Harvard SEAS](https://seas.harvard.edu/news/focusing-and-defocusing-light-without-lens).



 

 

 



 

 

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