Optical coherence engineering in the polarization and spatial degrees of freedom

We report a method to synthesize the complete range of arbitrary combinations of coherences independently in both the polarization and spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) by utilizing energy conserving unitary and non-unitary transformations. We further demonstrate that starting from a fully spatially coherent and polarized field, one can achieve two light fields having any degree of mutual coherence, and remixing these fields can result in maximum visibility (unit) interference fringes irrespective of any degree of polarization of the mixed field. We believe that these results provide new insight and may contribute significantly towards the ongoing explorations on optical coherence and its applications.