Cumulant functions in optical coherence theory |
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Authors: | CL Mehta |
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Institution: | (1) Physics Department, West Virginia University, 26506-2063 Morgantown, WV, USA;(2) Present address: Physics Department, Indian Institute of Technology, 110016 New Delhi, India |
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Abstract: | Cumulant functions are introduced to describe the statistical state of a radiation field. These functions are simply related
to the optical coherence functions but have some interesting features. It is shown that if the cumulant functions of all orders
greater than some numberN
0 vanish then they also vanish for all orders greater than 2. Thermal field is the only field having this property. This property
holds whether the field is described by a classical stochastic process or by a quantum density operator. Further the particular
operator ordering used in defining these cumulant functions for the quantized field affects only the second order cumulant
function. To describe the statistical state of a vector field such as partially polarized or unpolarized radiation, one would
need to introduce cumulant tensors. |
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Keywords: | Cumulant functions optical coherence Marcinkiewicz theorem |
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