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In physics, coherence length is the propagation distance over which a coherent wave (e.g. an electromagnetic wave) maintains a specified degree of coherence. Wave interference is strong when the paths taken by all of the interfering waves differ by less than the coherence length. A wave with a longer coherence length is closer to a perfect sinusoidal wave. Coherence length is important in holography and telecommunications engineering. This article focuses on the coherence of classical electromagnetic fields. In quantum mechanics, there is a mathematically analogous concept of the quantum coherence length of a wave function. ==Formulas== In radio-band systems, the coherence length is approximated by : where ''c'' is the speed of light in a vacuum, ''n'' is the refractive index of the medium, and is the bandwidth of the source. In optical communications, assuming that the source has a Gaussian emission spectrum, the coherence length is given by 〔Akcay, C., Parrein. P., and Rolland, J. P. (2002). Estimation of longitudinal resolution in optical coherence imaging. Applied Optics 41 (25), 5256-5262 〕 : where is the central wavelength of the source, is the refractive index of the medium, and is the spectral width of the source. If the source has a Gaussian spectrum with FWHM spectral width , then a path offset of ± will reduce the fringe visibility to 50%. ''Coherence length'' is usually applied to the optical regime. The expression above is a frequently used approximation. Due to ambiguities in the definition of spectral width of a source, however, the following definition of coherence length has been suggested: The coherence length can be measured using a Michelson interferometer and is the optical path length difference of a self-interfering laser beam which corresponds to a fringe visibility, where the fringe visibility is defined as : where is the fringe intensity. In long-distance transmission systems, the coherence length may be reduced by propagation factors such as dispersion, scattering, and diffraction. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「coherence length」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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