Can a light beam be considered to be the sum of a completely polarized and a completely unpolarized beam?

Optics Letters

Volumn 33, Issue 7, 2008, Pages 642-644

  Wolf, Emil ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

LIGHT BEAM; UNPOLARIZED BEAM;

OPTICS; THEOREM PROVING;

LIGHT POLARIZATION;

EID: 42449156654     PISSN: 01469592     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1364/OL.33.000642     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. G. G. Stokes, Trans. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 9, 399-416 (1852),
2. reprinted in W. Swindell, Polarized Light (Dowden, Hutchinson, P. Ross, 1975), pp. 124-141.
3. E. Wolf, Phys. Lett. A 312, 263 (2003).
4. E. Wolf, Opt. Lett. 28, 1078 (2003).
5. H. Roychowdhury and E. Wolf, Opt. Commun. 226, 57 (2003).
6. E. Wolf, Introduction to the Theory of Coherence of Polarization of Light (Cambridge U. Press, 2007).
7. J. Tervo, T. Setälä, and A. T. Friberg, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 21, 2205 (2004).
8. M. Alonso and E. Wolf, "A new representation of the cross-spectral density matrix of a planar, stochastic source," Opt. Commun, (to be published).
9. Usual treatments involving the Stokes parameters are carried out in the space-time rather than in the space-frequency domain. The two approaches are equivalent. However, the space-frequency representation has considerable advantages in treatments of problems involving propagation, because the propagation laws in the space-frequency domain are appreciably simpler than those in the space-time domain.
10. L. Mandel and E. Wolf, Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics (Cambridge U. Press, 1995).
11. M. Lahiri and E. Wolf, "Cross-spectral density matrix of the far field generated by blackbody sources," Opt. Commun, (to be published).