Interference phenomenon, regarded as a manifestation of the correlation between light beams at two or more space-time points is most often used to study the coherence properties of light. The correlation function is obtained from the measurement of the interference fringes formed when light from pairs of space-time separated points in the field are allowed to interfere. This idea was first used...

We describe results of calibration experiments using a new angle-resolved low coherence interferometry system. Light scattered from a polystyrene microsphere sample are compared with Mie Theory predictions to determine the size of the particles. © 2003 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: Low coherence interferometry, light scattering spectroscopy.

Coherence is a key concept in optics derived from the statistical nature of real light beams [1–3]. Coherence is usually understood as the principal requisite for good quality interference fringes. In this work we show from a quantum metrological perspective that this is not always the case, so that optimum interference and second-order coherence may become antithetical. More specifically, we f...

The degree of optical spatial coherence-a fundamental property of light that describes the mutual correlations between fluctuating electromagnetic fields-has been proven challenging to control at the micrometer scale. We use surface plasmon polaritons-evanescent waves excited on both surfaces of a thin metal film-as a means to mix the random fluctuations of the incident electromagnetic fields a...

Advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT) rely on the availability of broadband light that is spatially coherent. We present a technique to characterize coherence properties of broadband light using optical phasespace contours in transverse momentum and position. We demonstrate that these contour plots can be directly measured by a simple heterodyne imaging scheme possessing high dynamic r...

We study the coherence properties of a trapped two-component gas of fermionic atoms below the BCS critical temperature. We propose an optical method to investigate the Cooper pair coherence across different regions of the superfluid. Near-resonant laser light is used to induce transitions between the two coupled hyperfine states. The beam is split so that it probes two spatially separate region...

We deal with the imaging problem of determining the internal structure of a body from backscattered laser light and low-coherence interferometry. Specifically, using the interference fringes that result when the backscattering of low-coherence light is made to interfere with the reference beam, we obtain maps detailing the values of the refractive index within the sample. Our approach accounts ...