Singular-value decomposition and electromagnetic coherence of optical beams

We investigate the implications of the singular-value decomposition of the cross-spectral density (CSD) matrix to the description of electromagnetic spectral spatial coherence of stationary light beams. We show that in a transverse plane any CSD matrix can be expressed as a mixture of two CSD matrices corresponding to beams which are fully polarized but in general spatially partially coherent. The polarization and coherence structures of these constituent beams are specified, respectively, by the singular vectors and singular values of the full CSD matrix. It follows that vector-beam coherence, including the coherence Stokes parameters and the degree of coherence, can be formulated in terms of only two correlation functions. We further establish two-point analogs of the spectral and characteristic decompositions of the polarization matrix and show that in the case of a Hermitian CSD matrix their composition is specified by the so-called degree of cross-polarization. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group