September 2021
Spotlight Summary by Braulio García-Cámara
Anomalous spatial coherence changes in radiation and scattering
Coherence is one of the properties of light that has most recently been used to develop novel applications. Ranging from optical communications to holography, among others, researchers are currently designing a myriad of developments in which highly coherent beams are crucial. Consequently, strongly correlated light sources are required, with the associated difficulties in making them. However, contrary to the current knowledge, the results of Wadood et al. show that highly correlated sources cannot ensure highly coherent fields at any point in space. The interest of this work lies in that a field starting out as highly coherent, can evolve into a field with near-zero coherence in certain directions. While the Cittert-Zernike theorem states that the coherence of waves from uncorrelated sources can increase on propagation, this study comes to assert that the opposite behavior is also possible. The authors clearly show, both theoretically and experimentally, that this is a universal behavior in wave superposition, even in scattering. This study deserves the attention of researchers with interest not only in photonics (e.g. imaging or sensing applications) but also in quantum mechanics and other non-optical wave fields where the coherence has remarkable effects.
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Article Information
Anomalous spatial coherence changes in radiation and scattering
S. A. Wadood, H. F. Schouten, D. G. Fischer, T. D. Visser, and A. N. Vamivakas
Opt. Express 29(14) 21300-21312 (2021) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF