Experimental generation of an optical field with arbitrary spatial coherence properties

Abstract

We describe an experimental technique to generate a quasi-monochromatic field with any arbitrary spatial coherence properties that can be described by the cross-spectral density function, $W({\mathbf{r}}_1,{\mathbf{r}}_2)$. This is done by using a dynamic binary amplitude grating generated by a digital micromirror device (DMD) to rapidly alternate between a set of coherent fields, creating an incoherent mix of modes that represent the coherent mode decomposition of the desired $W({\mathbf{r}}_1,{\mathbf{r}}_2)$. This method was then demonstrated experimentally by interfering two plane waves and then spatially varying the coherent between these two modes such that the interference fringe visibility was shown to vary spatially between the two beams in an arbitrary and prescribed way.

6 pages, 5 figure

References in corpus (3)

• Influence of Atmospheric Turbulence on Optical Communications using Orbital Angular Momentum for Encoding
• Rapid Generation of Light Beams Carrying Orbital Angular Momentum
• Influence of atmospheric turbulence on states of light carrying orbital angular momentum

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Generating non-Rayleigh speckles with tailored intensity statistics
• Quantum-limited estimation of the axial separation of two incoherent point sources
• Spatio-Temporal Supermodes:Rapid Reduction of Spatial Coherence in Highly Multimode Lasers
• Experimental demonstration of superresolution of partially coherent light sources using parity sorting
• Wigner distribution of twisted photons
• Phase conjugation with spatially incoherent light in complex media
• Direct tomography of high-dimensional density matrices for general quantum states of photons
• Spectral ghost imaging camera with super-Rayleigh modulator
• Generation of Gaussian Schell-model fields as mixtures of their coherent modes
• Controlling spatial coherence with an optical complex medium
• Multiplexing Free-Space Channels using Twisted Light
• Measurement of two-point coherence functions of electromagnetic optical fields and applications of optical coherence