Fractional Fourier transform in temporal ghost imaging with classical light

Abstract

We investigate temporal, second-order classical ghost imaging with long, incoherent, scalar plane-wave pulses. We prove that in rather general conditions, the intensity correlation function at the output of the setup is given by the fractional Fourier transform of the temporal object. In special cases, the correlation function is shown to reduce to the ordinary Fourier transform and the temporal image of the object. Effects influencing the visibility and the resolution are considered. This work extends certain known results on spatial ghost imaging into the time domain and could find applications in temporal tomography of pulses.