Abstract
Young’s double-slit or two-beam interference is of fundamental importance to understand various interference effects, in which the stationary phase difference between two beams plays the key role in the first-order coherence. Different from the case of first-order coherence, in the high-order optical coherence the statistic behavior of the optical phase will play the key role. In this article, by employing a fundamental interfering configuration with two classical point sources, we showed that the high- order optical coherence between two classical point sources can be actively designed by controlling the statistic behavior of the relative phase difference between two point sources. Synchronous position Nth-order subwavelength interference with an effective wavelength of λ/M was demonstrated, in which λ is the wavelength of point sources and M is an integer not larger than N. Interestingly, we found that the synchronous position Nth-order interference fringe fingerprints the statistic trace of random phase fluctuation of two classical point sources, therefore, it provides an effective way to characterize the statistic properties of phase fluctuation for incoherent light sources.
Highlights
Coherence the statistic behavior of the optical phase difference between light beams will play an important role
We found that the high-order optical interference pattern reveals the statistic properties of the relative phase fluctuation of interfering light sources, which is of fundamental importance in optical science
In the other extreme case, when the two point sources are completely independent and the relative phase difference φ varies randomly in the range [0, 2π), it is evident that the two point sources are first-order incoherent, but one can observe high-order interference fringes, for example, two-photon interference fringe g(2)(x1, x2) = 1 + 0.5 cos(kd (x1 − x2)/z) with respect to the spatial separation between two observation points (x1 − x2)
Summary
Coherence the statistic behavior of the optical phase difference between light beams will play an important role. It is possible for one to actively design the high-order optical coherence for particular applications such as subwavelength interference and high spatial resolution optical lithography through control on the statistic behavior of optical phase of light sources. We found that the high-order optical interference pattern reveals the statistic properties of the relative phase fluctuation of interfering light sources, which is of fundamental importance in optical science
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