Optical Coherence and Polarization: An Experimental Outlook

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The description of the behavior of an electromagnetic beam on propagation needs a unification of its coherence and polarization properties. This book provides experimental ground to some of the theories propounded in last decade on the basis of this unification. Beginning with a prospect on the basic definitions, the elements of the matrices characterizing the polarization and coherence properties of random electromagnetic beams in the space-time and space-frequency domain are determined experimentally. Several experiments to determine the two-point (generalized) Stokes parameters for a laser beam and a partially coherent broadband light beam are also presented. Other experiments include observations of the invariance of spectral degree of coherence on filtering of light and the increase in complex degree of coherence with decrease in the bandwidth of light. In the end, the laws governing the effect of polarization of light on interference, called the Fresnel and Arago interference laws have been verified experimentally using the temporal coherence and the spatial coherence based interferometers. The simplicity of these methods makes them suitable for pedagogical applications also.