Abstract
In recent years, the longitudinal coherence properties of electron and neutron wave packets have been investigated1,2 and it was shown that their coherence length remains unchanged even though the length of the wave packet increases on propagation3,4. It was suggested in ref. 3 that the similar result might hold for light which propagates in a dispersive medium, because of the well-known analogy between the propagation of free particles in quantum mechanics and that of a classical fields in dispersive media. However, there is an essential difference between the two cases, because causality demands that a dispersive medium be necessarily also absorbing. In this paper, we discuss the coherence properties of fields which propagate in a one-dimensional medium which is dispersive and absorptive. We illustrate the results by examples.
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