title: Measuring the phase of spatially coherent polychromatic fields.
abstract: Realistic optical fields are never completely monochromatic and the interpretation of the concept of phase is not straightforward. It has been pointed out by Wolf that, if a strict condition of spatial coherence is imposed, the statistically averaged behavior of a polychromatic field can be described by an associated monochromatic wave. We show that, for spatially coherent polychromatic optical fields, the measurement of the phase of the second-order correlations determines the phase of this associated, spatially coherent field. We verify this prediction using a novel interferometric technique for measuring the cross-spectral density of a steady-state optical field.
authors.affiliation: School of Optics, University of Central Florida, Orlando 32816-2700, USA.
authors.forename: Aristide
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dogariu
authors.forename: Gabriel
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Popescu