A method of generating electromagnetic Gaussian Schell-model beams

Experimentally generating any desired partially coherent Schell-model source using phase-only control

“…Traditional approaches for generating Schell-model sources used SLMs in combination with amplitude filters to control both the phase and amplitude, respectively. [28][29][30]39,40,[44][45][46][47][49][50][51] Here, by using a single SLM to manipulate both amplitude and phase, these filters can be removed, thereby simplifying the optical setup while significantly increasing the flexibility of the overall system. This is a significant development and is the main contribution of this research.…”

“…A vast majority of this work has focused on generating Gaussian Schell-model (GSM) sources and their many variants. [28][29][30][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] These techniques can roughly be divided into two groups-those which exploit the van CittertZernike theorem 32,[50][51][52] and most relevant to this work, those which use diffusers or spatial light modulators (SLMs) to produce GSM sources. [28][29][30][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]49 The SLM-based synthesis techniques predominately use phase-only SLMs because of their widespread commercial availability.…”

“…For GSM synthesizers, this element is naturally a Gaussian amplitude filter. [28][29][30]39,40,[44][45][46][47][49][50][51] For more general source shapes, another SLM (either amplitude or phase-only) could be used; [53][54][55][56] however, aligning the SLMs can be difficult and is a potential source of error.…”

“…39,49,52 References 57 and 58 show the effects on the far-zone mean irradiance when non-Gaussian coherence functions are used in combination with Gaussian phase screens. Even with this shortcoming, the variety of sources which can be produced is quite impressive; [28][29][30]40,[44][45][46][47] however, some sources cannot be generated because of the aforementioned underlying Gaussian statistics.…”

Generation of partially coherent beams with controllable time-dependent coherence

“…Although using an SLM can quantitatively control the coherence of the light, the coherence of the light remains invariant in most of the studies. 14,[16][17][18][19][20][21] Furthermore, some studies are limited to the theoretical simulations 14,18 or focused only on the intensity distribution. 16,19,20 To the best of our knowledge, the generation of partially coherent beam with temporally variable coherence by using an SLM has not been reported.…”