Visibility for anharmonic fringes

Abstract

We examine a new approach to the visibility of interference fringes defined as the distance L2 to the uniform distribution. We show that this approach is superior to the standard approach when examining anharmonic fringes, while they coincide for harmonic fringes. We demonstrate the close relationship between this formalism and other well-studied measures of quantum uncertainty and information. We also show that this approach preserves the connection between visibility and correlation functions irrespective of the complexity of the interferometric pattern.