Characterization of optical beams with spiral phase interferometry

In this paper we study both theoretically and experimentally a method to characterize the amplitude and phase of a paraxial optical beam. The method is based on the spiral phase interferometry technique, recently proposed. We theoretically analyze how to adapt the original proposal to deal with the special characteristics of finite optical beams. Finally, we compare a series of numerical and experimental results to show the advantages and limitations of our proposal.