title: Evaluation of the spatial coherence of a light beam through transverse intensity measurements.
abstract: The problem of recovering the coherence features of a partially coherent quasi-monochromatic scalar optical source, starting solely from intensity measurements on the emitted beam, is addressed in the most general way, under the paraxial approximation. In particular, it is shown that on expanding the beam emitted by the source as a bundle of partially correlated Hermite-Gaussian beams, the correlation coefficients can be recovered, in principle, simply by performing scalar products between transverse intensity distributions and suitably defined functions.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Elettronica Applicata and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Universita Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale 84, 1-00146 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Riccardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Borghi
authors.forename: Giorgio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Guattari
authors.forename: Lorenzo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: de la Torre
authors.forename: Franco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Gori
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Santarsiero