Second-order Lau effect with pseudo-thermal light

Abstract Lau effect is a self-imaging formed in the far field of a pair of gratings illuminated by spatially incoherent light. We report the experimental demonstration of the second-order Lau effect with incoherently pseudo-thermal light. Spatially periodic structures were nonlocally superposed giving rise to interference patterns in intensity correlation measurement. The experimental results are in agreement with the theoretical analysis. The second-order Lau effect can be well understood by the unfolded version of the experimental setup where the bucket detection can be thought as the incoherent illumination in classical Lau effect.