title: Ray picture of polarization and coherence in a Young interferometer.
abstract: We apply a polarization Wigner formalism to the propagation of polarization in a Young interferometer within paraxial approximation. With a very simple ray picture, we obtain complete and rigorous information about polarization evolution via the superposition of the spatial-angular Stokes parameters associated with three light rays. We compare the degree of polarization in the interference region with several measures of the degree of coherence for vectorial fields.
authors.affiliation: Departmento de Optica, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas, Universidad Complutense, 20840 Madrid, Spain. alluis@fis.ucm.es
authors.forename: Alfredo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Luis