2Coherence Property of Light—The State of the Radiation
2.1 Coherence Property of Light
In this section, we introduce the concept of coherence. What do we mean when we name a radiation coherent or incoherent? For instance, what is the physical reason for us to consider a discharge tube radiates incoherent light, but a laser radiates coherent light? We will start our discussion from the simple model of radiation we have introduced in Chapter 1. To simplify the discussion, we consider far-field measurements on a radiation, which comes from a point source that contains a large number of point sub-sources, such as trillions of atomic transitions. Focusing on the coherent and incoherent superposition in terms of the sub-sources and Fourier modes, ...
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