Recent progress on the unified theory of polarization and coherence for stochastic electromagnetic fields

Abstract

All optical fields undergo random fluctuation and the underlying theory referred to as coherence and polarization of optical fields has played a fundamental role as an important manifestation of the random fluctuations of the electric fields. In this paper, we reviewed our recent theoretical and experimental work on the unified theory of polarization and coherence including coherence tensor wave, degree of coherence tensor, degree of generalized Stokes parameters, and their applications including coherence tensor holography and two-point resolution of polarimetric imaging.

M2 factor of a vector Schell-model beam

“…This analysis is useful considering the wide-spread use of M 2 to assess beam quality and a large number of vector Schell-model sources that have been developed for applications, such as free-space/underwater optical communications, directed energy, optical trapping/tweezers, etc. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] For directed energy, in particular, the use of M 2 to describe beam quality is pervasive, and there has been recent work in modeling dynamic, stochastic, noncommon-path phase errors in high-energy-laser systems in terms of M 2 . 27 Most importantly, having a relation for the M 2 factor of a general EM Schell-model source allows one to consider beam quality in the design of new vector Schell-model beams.…”