Synthesis of Polychromatic Light Sources with Arbitrary Degrees of Coherence: Some Experiments

Abstract A simple optical system for synthesizing two-dimensional planar sources having a wide variety of one-dimensional spectral degrees of coherence is analysed. A pupil-mask acting on the dispersed image of a polychromatic incoherent slit is used to control the spectral degree of coherence of the source. Examples of sources exhibiting interesting spectral shifts and modulations in the far field are shown.