Measuring the phase of spatially coherent polychromatic fields

    Authors

    A. Dogariu;G. Popescu

    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Phys. Rev. Lett.

    Keywords

    Physics, Multidisciplinary

    Abstract

    Realistic optical fields are never completely monochromatic and the interpretation of the concept of phase is not straightforward. It has been pointed out by Wolf that, if a strict condition of spatial coherence is imposed, the statistically averaged behavior of a polychromatic field can be described by an associated monochromatic wave. We show that, for spatially coherent polychromatic optical fields, the measurement of the phase of the second-order correlations determines the phase of this associated, spatially coherent field. We verify this prediction using a novel interferometric technique for measuring the cross-spectral density of a steady-state optical field.

    Journal Title

    Physical Review Letters

    Volume

    89

    Issue/Number

    24

    Publication Date

    1-1-2002

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    2

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000179484700014

    ISSN

    0031-9007

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