Publicitad D▼
⇨ definición de Coherence_(physics) (Wikipedia)
Publicidad ▼
Wikipedia
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (November 2009) |
In physics, coherence is an ideal property of waves that enables stationary (i.e. temporally and spatially constant) interference. It contains in fact several distinct concepts, which are limit cases that never occur in reality but allows to understand the physics of waves and has become in particular a very important concept in quantum physics. More generally, coherence describes all properties of the correlation between physical quantities of a single wave, or between several waves or wave packets. One should note at this point that interference is nothing more than the addition, in a mathematical sense, of wave functions. In quantum physics, a single wave can interfere with itself, but this is due to its quantum behavior and is still an addition of two waves (see Young's slits experiment). This implies that constructive or destructive interferences are limit cases, and that waves can always interfere, even if the result of the addition is complicated or not remarkable.
When interfering, two waves can add together to create a wave of greater amplitude than either one (constructive interference) or subtract from each other to create a wave of lesser amplitude than either one (destructive interference), depending on their relative phase. Two waves are said to be coherent if they have a constant relative phase. The degree of coherence is measured by the interference visibility, a measure of how perfectly the waves can cancel due to destructive interference.
Temporal and Spatial Coherence can be exhibited by Michelson–Morley experiment and Young's slits experiment respectively. Once the infringes are obtained in Michelson–Morley experiment, if now one of the mirror is moved away gradually then the time for the beam to travel increases and the infringes become dull and finally are lost, showing Temporal Coherence. Similarly if in Young's double slit experiment if the space between the two slits is increased, the coherence dies gradually and finally the infringes disappear , showing Spatial Coherence.
Contents |
Coherence was originally conceived in connection with Thomas Young's double-slit experiment in optics but is now used in any field that involves waves, such as acoustics, electrical engineering, neuroscience, and quantum mechanics. The property of coherence is the basis for commercial applications such as holography, the Sagnac gyroscope, radio antenna arrays, optical coherence tomography and telescope interferometers (astronomical optical interferometers and radio telescopes).
The coherence of two waves follows from how well correlated the waves are as quantified by the cross-correlation function.[1][2][3][4][5] The cross-correlation quantifies the ability to predict the value of the second wave by knowing the value of the first. As an example, consider two waves perfectly correlated for all times. At any time, if the first wave changes, the second will change in the same way. If combined they can exhibit complete constructive interference/superposition at all times, then it follows that they are perfectly coherent. As will be discussed below, the second wave need not be a separate entity. It could be the first wave at a different time or position. In this case, the measure of correlation is the autocorrelation function (sometimes called self-coherence). Degree of correlation involves correlation functions.
These states are unified by the fact that their behavior is described by a wave equation or some generalization thereof.
In most of these systems, one can measure the wave directly. Consequently, its correlation with another wave can simply be calculated. However, in optics one cannot measure the electric field directly as it oscillates much faster than any detector’s time resolution.[6] Instead, we measure the intensity of the light. Most of the concepts involving coherence which will be introduced below were developed in the field of optics and then used in other fields. Therefore, many of the standard measurements of coherence are indirect measurements, even in fields where the wave can be measured directly.
Temporal coherence is the measure of the average correlation between the value of a wave and itself delayed by τ, at any pair of times. Temporal coherence tells us how monochromatic a source is. In other words, it characterizes how well a wave can interfere with itself at a different time. The delay over which the phase or amplitude wanders by a significant amount (and hence the correlation decreases by significant amount) is defined as the coherence time τc. At τ=0 the degree of coherence is perfect whereas it drops significantly by delay τc. The coherence length Lc is defined as the distance the wave travels in time τc.
One should be careful not to confuse the coherence time with the time duration of the signal, nor the coherence length with the coherence area (see below).
It can be shown that the faster a wave decorrelates (and hence the smaller τc is) the larger the range of frequencies Δf the wave contains. Thus there is a tradeoff:
Formally, this follows from the convolution theorem in mathematics, which relates the Fourier transform of the power spectrum (the intensity of each frequency) to its autocorrelation.
We consider four examples of temporal coherence.
The most monochromatic sources are usually lasers; such high monochromaticity implies long coherence lengths (up to hundreds of meters). For example, a stabilized helium-neon laser can produce light with coherence lengths in excess of 5 m[citation needed]. Not all lasers are monochromatic, however (e.g. for a mode-locked Ti-sapphire laser, Δλ ≈ 2 nm - 70 nm). LEDs are characterized by Δλ ≈ 50 nm, and tungsten filament lights exhibit Δλ ≈ 600 nm, so these sources have shorter coherence times than the most monochromatic lasers.
Holography requires light with a long coherence time. In contrast, Optical coherence tomography uses light with a short coherence time.
In optics, temporal coherence is measured in an interferometer such as the Michelson interferometer or Mach–Zehnder interferometer. In these devices, a wave is combined with a copy of itself that is delayed by time τ. A detector measures the time-averaged intensity of the light exiting the interferometer. The resulting interference visibility (e.g. see Figure 4) gives the temporal coherence at delay τ. Since for most natural light sources, the coherence time is much shorter than the time resolution of any detector, the detector itself does the time averaging. Consider the example shown in Figure 3. At a fixed delay, here 2τc, an infinitely fast detector would measure an intensity that fluctuates significantly over a time t equal to τc. In this case, to find the temporal coherence at 2τc, one would manually time-average the intensity.
In some systems, such as water waves or optics, wave-like states can extend over one or two dimensions. Spatial coherence describes the ability for two points in space, x1 and x2, in the extent of a wave to interfere, when averaged over time. More precisely, the spatial coherence is the cross-correlation between two points in a wave for all times. If a wave has only 1 value of amplitude over an infinite length, it is perfectly spatially coherent. The range of separation between the two points over which there is significant interference is called the coherence area, Ac. This is the relevant type of coherence for the Young’s double-slit interferometer. It is also used in optical imaging systems and particularly in various types of astronomy telescopes. Sometimes people also use “spatial coherence” to refer to the visibility when a wave-like state is combined with a spatially shifted copy of itself.
Figure 5: A plane wave with an infinite coherence length.
Figure 8: A wave with finite coherence area is incident on a pinhole (small aperture). The wave will diffract out of the pinhole. Far from the pinhole the emerging spherical wavefronts are approximately flat. The coherence area is now infinite while the coherence length is unchanged.
Figure 9: A wave with infinite coherence area is combined with a spatially shifted copy of itself. Some sections in the wave interfere constructively and some will interfere destructively. Averaging over these sections, a detector with length D will measure reduced interference visibility. For example a misaligned Mach–Zehnder interferometer will do this.
Consider a tungsten light-bulb filament. Different points in the filament emit light independently and have no fixed phase-relationship. In detail, at any point in time the profile of the emitted light is going to be distorted. The profile will change randomly over the coherence time . Since for a white-light source such as a light-bulb is small, the filament is considered a spatially incoherent source. In contrast, a radio antenna array, has large spatial coherence because antennas at opposite ends of the array emit with a fixed phase-relationship. Light waves produced by a laser often have high temporal and spatial coherence (though the degree of coherence depends strongly on the exact properties of the laser). Spatial coherence of laser beams also manifests itself as speckle patterns and diffraction fringes seen at the edges of shadow.
Holography requires temporally and spatially coherent light. Its inventor, Dennis Gabor, produced successful holograms more than ten years before lasers were invented. To produce coherent light he passed the monochromatic light from an emission line of a mercury-vapor lamp through a pinhole spatial filter.
In February 2011, Dr Andrew Truscott, leader of a research team at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics at Australian National University in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, showed that helium atoms cooled to near absolute zero / Bose-Einstein condensate state, can be made to flow and behave as a coherent beam as occurs in a laser.[7][8]
Waves of different frequencies (in light these are different colours) can interfere to form a pulse if they have a fixed relative phase-relationship (see Fourier transform). Conversely, if waves of different frequencies are not coherent, then, when combined, they create a wave that is continuous in time (e.g. white light or white noise). The temporal duration of the pulse is limited by the spectral bandwidth of the light according to:
which follows from the properties of the Fourier transform (for quantum particles it also results in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle).
If the phase depends linearly on the frequency (i.e. ) then the pulse will have the minimum time duration for its bandwidth (a transform-limited pulse), otherwise it is chirped (see dispersion).
Measurement of the spectral coherence of light requires a nonlinear optical interferometer, such as an intensity optical correlator, frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), or Spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER).
Light also has a polarization, which is the direction in which the electric field oscillates. Unpolarized light is composed of incoherent light waves with random polarization angles. The electric field of the unpolarized light wanders in every direction and changes in phase over the coherence time of the two light waves. An absorbing polarizer rotated to any angle will always transmit half the incident intensity when averaged over time.
If the electric field wanders by a smaller amount the light will be partially polarized so that at some angle, the polarizer will transmit more than half the intensity. If a wave is combined with an orthogonally polarized copy of itself delayed by less than the coherence time, partially polarized light is created.
The polarization of a light beam is represented by a vector in the Poincare sphere. For polarized light the end of the vector lies on the surface of the sphere, whereas the vector has zero length for unpolarized light. The vector for partially polarized light lies within the sphere
Coherent superpositions of optical wave fields include holography. Holographic objects are used frequently in daily life in bank notes and credit cards.
Further applications concern the coherent superposition of non-optical wave fields. In quantum mechanics for example one considers a probability field, which is related to the wave function (interpretation: density of the probability amplitude). Here the applications concern, among others, the future technologies of quantum computing and the already available technology of quantum cryptography. Additionally the problems of the following subchapter are treated.
In quantum mechanics, all objects have wave-like properties (see de Broglie waves). For instance, in Young's Double-slit experiment electrons can be used in the place of light waves. Each electron's wave-function goes through both slits, and hence has two separate split-beams that contribute to the intensity pattern on a screen. According to standard wave theory [Fresnel, Huygens] these two contributions give rise to an intensity pattern of bright bands due to constructive interference, interlaced with dark bands due to destructive interference, on a downstream screen. (Each split-beam, by itself, generates a diffraction pattern with less noticeable, more widely spaced dark and light bands.) This ability to interfere and diffract is related to coherence (classical or quantum) of the wave. The association of an electron with a wave is unique to quantum theory.
When the incident beam is represented by a quantum pure state, the split beams downstream of the two slits are represented as a superposition of the pure states representing each split beam. (This has nothing to do with two particles or Bell's inequalities relevant to an entangled state: a 2-body state, a kind of coherence between two 1-body states.) The quantum description of imperfectly coherent paths is called a mixed state. A perfectly coherent state has a density matrix (also called the "statistical operator") that is a projection onto the pure coherent state, while a mixed state is described by a classical probability distribution for the pure states that make up the mixture.
Large-scale (macroscopic) quantum coherence leads to novel phenomena, the so-called macroscopic quantum phenomena. For instance, the laser, superconductivity, and superfluidity are examples of highly coherent quantum systems, whose effects are evident at the macroscopic scale. The macroscopic quantum coherence (Off-Diagonal Long-Range Order, ODLRO) [Penrose & Onsager (1957), C. N. Yang (1962)] for laser light, and superfluidity, is related to first-order (1-body) coherence/ODLRO, while superconductivity is related to second-order coherence/ODLRO. (For fermions, such as electrons, only even orders of coherence/ODLRO are possible.) Superfluidity in liquid He4 is related to a partial Bose–Einstein condensate. Here, the condensate portion is described by a multiply occupied single-particle state. [e.g., Cummings & Johnston (1966)]
On the other hand, the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment highlights the fact that quantum coherence cannot be arbitrarily applied to macroscopic situations. In order to have a quantum superposition of dead and alive cat, one needs to have pure states associated with aliveness and pure states associated with death, which are then superposed. Given the problem of defining death (absence of EEG, heart beat, ...) it is hard to imagine a set of quantum parameters that could be used in constructing such superposition. In any case, this is not a good topic for a description of quantum coherence. [Ref.: Fresnel, Huygens, R. Glauber (1963)]
Regarding the occurrence of quantum coherence at a macroscopic level, it is interesting to note that the classical electromagnetic field exhibits macroscopic quantum coherence. The most obvious example is carrier signals for radio and TV. They satisfy Glauber's quantum description of coherence.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Coherence |
Contenido de sensagent
computado en 0,031s