Spectral and Dispersion Analysis of Laser Sources and Multimode Fibres Via the Statistics of the Intensity Pattern

Abstract

The statistics of an intensity pattern at the exit face of a multimode fibre excited by a quasimonochromatic source is analysed by means of an expression for speckle pattern contrast. Theoretical considerations that take advantages of both classical coherence formalism and guided-mode field representation of light propagating in multimode fibres lead to two equivalent expressions for speckle pattern contrast; the first is expressed in the time domain by using a source temporal coherence function and the second is expressed in the frequency domain by using a frequency correlation function of the source spectral density. Moreover, the modal guiding conditions in multimode fibre are in both expressions governed by a maximum group delay time difference. The feasibility of both expressions, especially the second, is demonstrated by analytic expressions for the speckle pattern contrast for seven different spectra, that is the influence of the source temporal coherence as well as the modal dispersion is thus clearly shown.