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Light also has a polarization, which is the direction in which the electric or magnetic field oscillates. Unpolarized light is composed of incoherent light waves with random polarization angles. The electric field of the unpolarized light wanders in every direction and changes in phase over the coherence time of the two light waves.
This effect is termed photon bunching. Moreover, if a laser light was used at the source instead of chaotic light, then second order coherence would be independent of the time delay. HBT's experiment allows for a fundamentally distinction in the way in which photons are emitted from a laser compared to a natural light source.
In physics, coherence theory is the study of optical effects arising from partially coherent light and radio sources. Partially coherent sources are sources where the coherence time or coherence length are limited by bandwidth, by thermal noise, or by other effect.
The coherence time, usually designated τ, is calculated by dividing the coherence length by the phase velocity of light in a medium; approximately given by = where λ is the central wavelength of the source, Δν and Δλ is the spectral width of the source in units of frequency and wavelength respectively, and c is the speed of light in vacuum.
If the source has a Gaussian spectrum with FWHM spectral width , then a path offset of will reduce the fringe visibility to 50%. It is important to note that this is a roundtrip coherence length — this definition is applied in applications like OCT where the light traverses the measured displacement twice (as in a Michelson interferometer ).
Likewise if a coherent-state light beam is partially absorbed, then the remainder is a pure coherent state with a smaller amplitude, whereas partial absorption of non-coherent-state light produces a more complicated statistical mixed state. [11]
Conventional light sources emit waves of differing frequencies and at different times from different points in the source. If the light is split into two waves and then re-combined, each individual light wave may generate an interference pattern with its other half, but the individual fringe patterns generated will have different phases and ...
A coherent state, as output by a laser far above threshold, has Poissonian statistics yielding random photon spacing; while a thermal light field has super-Poissonian statistics and yields bunched photon spacing. In the thermal (bunched) case, the number of fluctuations is larger than a coherent state; for an antibunched source they are smaller ...