Can circularly polarized light interfere with linearly polarized

Albert V

Can circularly polarized light interfere with linearly polarized light?

chrisbaird

Yes. You can think of circularly polarized light as the coherent sum of two orthogonal, linearly polarized waves that are 90 degrees out of phase. So the other linearly polarized wave will interfere with one of the components.

clem

The two beams would have to come from splitting single beam.

y33t

Why ?

clem

The two interfering beams must be coherent. Two independent beams would have incoherent phase relations.

y33t

They can be coherent and belong to different identical sources ?

Claude Bile

Coherence is a bit of a red herring here. Do the Jones calculus and you can see quite clearly that a CP wave and a LP wave can interfere (or indeed, must interfere if they overlap spatially).

Claude.