Young's interference fringes with narrow-band light.
The changes in the interference pattern in Young's interference experiment, produced by placing two identical narrow-band filters in front of the pinholes, are analyzed. It is shown theoretically that, in general, the fringes will not become sharp (i.e., their maximum visibility will not tend to unity) even when the filters have arbitrarily narrow passbands. The analysis brings out a relationship between the complex degree of coherence in the space-time and the space-frequency domains. When the passbands of the filters are narrow enough, the filtered light is found to be cross-spectrally pure.
Wolf
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