Abstract

In recent years considerable efforts have been made to produce devices which discriminate between laser light and diffuse (ambient) light.¹ All these investigations were based on differences between the spectral characteristics, i.e., the temporal coherence properties of the light. We first summarize the results of a recent analysis² which indicates that discrimination on the basis of spatial coherence might also be possible. More specifically, we consider light of any state of coherence incident on a scattering medium, and we show how the angular distributions of the scattered intensity depend both on the properties of the scattering medium and on the degree of spatial coherence of the incident light. We then illustrate the results by application to Bragg holographic filtering. Some experimental results illustrating the theoretical analysis are also presented.

© 1988 Optical Society of America