Measuring, processing, and generating partially coherent light with self-configuring optics

Understand

Optical phenomena always display some degree of partial coherence between their respective degrees of freedom.

• Partial coherence is of particular interest in multimodal systems, where classical and quantum correlations between spatial, polarization, and spectral degrees of freedom can lead to fascinating phenomena (e.g., entanglement) and be leveraged for advanced imaging and sensing modalities (e.g., in hyperspectral, polarization, and ghost imaging).
• Here, we present a universal method to analyze, process, and generate spatially partially coherent light in multimode systems by using self-configuring optical networks.
• Our method relies on cascaded self-configuring layers whose average power outputs are sequentially optimized.