A class of partially coherent beams carrying optical vortices.
A new class of partially coherent beams with a separable phase, which carry optical vortices, is introduced. It is shown that any member of the class can be represented as an incoherent superposition of fully coherent Laguerre-Gauss modes of arbitrary order, with the same azimuthal mode index. The free-space propagation properties of such partially coherent beams are studied analytically, and their M2 quality factor is investigated numerically.
Ponomarenko
S A
SA
Department of Physics and Astronomy and Rochester Theory Center for Optical Science and Engineering, University of Rochester, New York 14627, USA. ponos@pas.rochester.edu