Generating electromagnetic nonuniformly correlated beams

We develop a method to generate electromagnetic nonuniformly correlated (ENUC) sources from vector Gaussian Schell-model (GSM) beams. Having spatially varying correlation properties, ENUC sources are more difficult to synthesize than their Schell-model counterparts (which can be generated by filtering circular complex Gaussian random numbers) and, in past work, have only been realized using Cholesky decomposition-a computationally intensive procedure. Here we transform electromagnetic GSM field instances directly into ENUC instances, thereby avoiding computing Cholesky factors resulting in significant savings in time and computing resources. We validate our method by generating (via simulation) an ENUC beam with desired parameters. We find the simulated results to be in excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions. This new method for generating ENUC sources can be directly implemented on existing spatial-light-modulator-based vector beam generators and will be useful in applications where nonuniformly correlated beams have shown promise, e.g., free-space/underwater optical communications.