The problem of recovering the coherence features of a partially coherent quasi-monochromatic scalar optical source, starting solely from intensity measurements on the emitted beam, is addressed in the most general way, under the paraxial approximation. In particular, it is shown that on expanding the beam emitted by the source as a bundle of partially correlated Hermite–Gaussian beams, the correlation coefficients can be recovered, in principle, simply by performing scalar products between transverse intensity distributions and suitably defined functions.
© 2003 Optical Society of America
Original Manuscript: November 11, 2002
Revised Manuscript: April 8, 2003
Manuscript Accepted: April 8, 2003
Published: September 1, 2003
Riccardo Borghi, Giorgio Guattari, Lorenzo de la Torre, Franco Gori, and Massimo Santarsiero, "Evaluation of the spatial coherence of a light beam through transverse intensity measurements," J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 20, 1763-1770 (2003)