Abstract
The statistical description of optical fields in coherence theory is based on underlying fluctuations originating at the source or during propagation through a random medium. We show that uncertainty (partial coherence) also stems from the act of ignoring a degree of freedom of a beam when observing another degree of freedom classically entangled with it. Specifically, we demonstrate that Bells measure, commonly used in tests of quantum non-locality, is as a quantitative tool that delineates intrinsic incoherence associated with statistical fluctuations from classical entanglement-based incoherence. This demonstrates, more generally, the applicability of concepts from quantum information processing to classical optical coherence theory and optical signal processing.
© 2013 Optical Society of America
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