Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect in the spatiotemporal domain II: the effect of spatiotemporal coupling

Abstract

Spatiotemporal coupling is present when the electric fields of any pulsed beams fail to separate into a product of purely spatial and temporal factors, and it affects ultimately on the propagation of the light. Here we study the effect of spatiotemporal coupling on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect for the first time, with the help of our recent developed method [Opt. Express 28, 32077 (2020)10.1364/OE.405726], by assuming the Gaussian statistics of partially coherent spatiotemporal pulsed sources containing the intensity and correlation coupling effect between the spatial and temporal domain. The generalized results for the spatiotemporal coupling HBT effect are investigated and through a nontrivial two-dimensional case, we numerically illustrate the influence of the spatiotemporal coupling on the HBT effect. It observes that even a very tiny coupling effect will strongly change the HBT effect at longer distances. This work will be potentially useful for the study of the HBT effect (intensity-intensity correlations) with dynamic sources having spatiotemporal coupling in both optics and other branches of physics.