A new experimental procedure for determining the response of bolometric detectors to fields in any state of spatial coherence

摘要

We describe a procedure for measuring the full spatial state of coherence to which a bolometric detector issensitive. It is based on the result that the expectation value of the output of any detector is given by thecontraction of two tensor fields, one of which describes the state of coherence of the incoming radiation, and theother describes the state of coherence of the field to which the detector is sensitive. It follows that if a detector isilluminated by two coherent point sources and the phase of one source rotated relative to the other, the detectoroutput displays a fringe. By repeating the process with different source locations, the entire detector coherencetensor can be reconstructed from the recorded complex visibilities.