Experimental study of spatial coherence diffraction based on full-field coherence visualization.

A novel optical geometry for direct visualization of the optical coherence function is proposed. The diffractions of partially coherent light by apertures with various forms are experimentally investigated, and the full-field spatial coherence functions have been observed by using the proposed interferometric system. Similar to the well-known Airy disk stemming from optical diffraction, we studied the spatial coherence function near the coherence focal plane on the analogy of the Fraunhofer and Fresnel diffraction integrals. Following the conventional definitions for the optical resolutions in the optical imaging system, the lateral and longitudinal resolutions for spatial coherence imaging have been proposed.