Theory of two beam interference with arbitrary spectra.

A new formulation describing the interference term of a two beam interferometer with unequal Gaussian spectra propagating in different dispersive media is provided by defining a composite standard deviation and a composite center frequency of the interfering spectra. This formulation is generalized to arbitrary spectra by decomposing each spectrum into a linear composition of Gaussian distributions. The effective phase and group delays indicate the effect of the unequal spectral distributions and the dispersive media. An effective coherence length is derived, different than the coherence lengths of the interfering fields. The accuracy of the new formulation is proven experimentally by using optical coherence tomography systems.

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