Pulse shaping of incoherent light by use of a liquid-crystal modulator array

We demonstrate the use of a femtosecond pulse-shaping apparatus for electronically programmable phase filtering of amplified spontaneous emission from an erbium-doped fiber amplifier. Pulse shaping applied to a broadband incoherent light (noise) input results in reshaped noise, with a specially tailored electric field correlation function. Our experiments clearly reveal that phase filtering can strongly affect the coherence properties of broadband, phase-incoherent light.