Spatial coherence properties of light from optical fibres

Abstract

The mutual intensity of the optical field in the Fraunhofer diffraction region produced from the end of an optical fibre under illumination of a coherent beam, is theoretically analysed by using an optical fibre-end source model. In this source model, the optical field at the end of the fibre is expressed as an aggregation of independent plane waves with random directions and phases, because the guided modes propagating through the fibre may be regarded as a stochastic process. It is found that the optical field in the diffraction region from the multimode optical fibre is not homogeneous butquasi homogeneous in a statistical sense. The spatial coherence properties in the field are discussed in connection with theV number (the normalized frequency) of the fibre and in comparison with those in the field produced from an incoherent source obeying the van Cittert-Zernike theorem.