We study the problem of coupling an electromagnetic beam of any state of coherence and polarization into a multimode optical fiber. Using the well-known concept of the cross-spectral density matrix, we derive a general expression for the coupling efficiency of a stochastic electromagnetic beam into a multimode fiber in terms of the cross-spectral density matrix of the incident beam and another matrix representing field distributions of fiber modes. We apply this result to a specific case in which the incident beam belongs to a broad class of so-called electromagnetic Gaussian Schell-model beams and obtain a simple analytical expression for the coupling efficiency in the case of single-mode fibers. We use this expression to study how coupling efficiency depends on the coherence and polarization properties of the incident beam.
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