Title

Measuring the phase of spatially coherent polychromatic fields

Authors

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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