Changing the speed of optical coherence in free space

Abstract

It is typically assumed that the fluctuations associated with a stationary broadband incoherent field propagate in free space at the speed of light in vacuum c. Here we introduce the concept of 'coherence group velocity', which -- in analogy to the group velocity of coherent pulses -- is the speed of the peak of the coherence function. We confirm experimentally that incorporating a judicious spatio-temporal spectral structure into a field allows tuning its coherence group velocity in free space. Utilizing light from a super-luminescent diode, we interferometrically measure the group delay encountered by the cross-correlation of a structured field synthesized from this source with the unstructured diode field. By tracking the propagation of this cross-correlation function, we measure coherence group velocities in the range from 12c to -6c.

References in corpus (2)

• Diffraction-free space-time beams
• Ultrashort Tilted-Pulse-Front Pulses and Nonparaxial Tilted-Phase-Front Beams

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• Relativistic transformations of quasi-monochromatic optical beams
• Spectrally recycling space-time wave packets
• Theory of space-time supermodes in planar multimode waveguides
• Bending space-time wave packets