Abstract

Spatial coherence is one of the signature properties of traditional lasers. While spatial coherence allows laser emission to be focused to a small volume or collimated over long distances, it is also the cause of deleterious effects such as speckle which has limited the adoption of lasers in most imaging applications [1]. In this work, we show that random lasers have the unique ability to exhibit tunable spatial coherence. We discuss the parameters which dictate the spatial coherence of random lasers and show that a random laser with low spatial coherence can produce speckle-free images.

© 2013 IEEE