Phase-Space Propagator for Partially Coherent Wave Fields in the Spatial Domain

The propagation of wave fields and their interactions with matter are important for established and emerging fields in optical sciences. Efficient methods for predicting such behaviour have been employed routinely for coherent sources. However, most real world optical systems exhibit partial coherence, for which the present mathematical description involves high dimensional complex functions and hence poses challenges for numerical implementations. This demands significant computational resources to determine the properties of partially coherent wavefields. Here, we describe the novel Phase-Space (PS) propagator, an efficient and self-consistent technique for free space propagation of wave fields which are partially coherent in the spatial domain. The PS propagator makes use of the fact that the propagation of a wave field in free space is equivalent to a shearing of the corresponding PSD function. Computationally, this approach is simpler and the need for using different propagation methods for near and far-field regions is removed.