Abstract

In our formulation spatial and temporal coherence effects of the source are assumed to be separable. The random source phase due to spatial coherence is introduced as where a is a random phase shift, b is a random phase tilt and s is the source coordinate. The mutual source coherence function can then be expressed as where Gaussian statistics are assumed and ${\text{ρ}}_{\text{s}}^2=1/〈{\text{b}}^2〉$ is a measure of spatial coherence; the source tends to an incoherent one as ρ_s → 0 and towards a coherent one as ρ_s > α_s where α_s is the size of the source.

© 1983 Optical Society of America