Optical Coherency Matrix Tomography

Abstract

The coherence of an optical beam having multiple degrees of freedom (DoFs) is described by a coherency matrix G spanning these DoFs. This optical coherency matrix has not been measured in its entirety to date-even in the simplest case of two binary DoFs where G is a 4'4 matrix. We establish a methodical yet versatile approach-optical coherency matrix tomography-for reconstructing G that exploits the analogy between this problem in classical optics and that of tomographically reconstructing the density matrix associated with multipartite quantum states in quantum information science. Here G is reconstructed from a minimal set of linearly independent measurements, each a cascade of projective measurements for each DoF. We report the first experimental measurements of the 4'4 coherency matrix G associated with an electromagnetic beam in which polarization and a spatial DoF are relevant, ranging from the traditional two-point Young's double slit to spatial parity and orbital angular momentum modes.

Publication Date

10-19-2015

Publication Title

Scientific Reports

Volume

5

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep15333

Socpus ID

84945193383 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84945193383

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