Experimental determining the coherent-mode structure of vector electromagnetic field through its decomposition in reference basis

Abstract

A technique for experimental determining the coherent-mode structure of electromagnetic field is proposed. This technique is based on the coherence measurements of the field in some reference basis and represents a nontrivial vector generalization of the dual-mode field correlation method recently reported by F. Ferreira and M. Belsley [Opt. Lett.38(21), 4350 (2013)]. The justifiability and efficiency of the proposed technique is illustrated by an example of determining the coherent-mode structure of some specially generated and experimentally characterized secondary electromagnetic source.