David Kuebel

Characterizing planetary orbits and the trajectories of light in the Schwarzschild metric

Exact analytic expressions for planetary orbits and light trajectories in the Schwarzschild geometry are presented. A new parameter space is used to characterize all possible planetary orbits. Different regions in this parameter space can be associated with different characteristics of the orbits. The boundaries for these regions are clearly defined. Observational data can be directly associated with points in the regions. A possible extension of these considerations with an additional parameter for the case of Kerr geometry is briefly discussed.

Unpolarized light beams with different coherence properties

We investigate the coherence properties of unpolarized beams. Such beams form a much richer class than has been previously realized. We illustrate our results by examples.

Electromagnetic diffraction theory of refractive axicon lenses

We study the field that is produced by a paraxial refractive axicon lens. The results from geometrical optics, scalar wave optics, and electromagnetic diffraction theory are compared. In particular, the axial intensity, the on-axis effective wavelength, the transverse intensity, and the far-zone field are examined. A rigorous electromagnetic diffraction analysis shows that the state of polarization of the incident beam strongly affects the transverse intensity distribution, but not the intensity distribution in the far zone.

Polarization and coherence in the Hanbury Brown–Twiss effect

Abstract We study the correlation of intensity fluctuations in random electromagnetic beams, the so-called Hanbury Brown–Twiss effect (HBT). We show that not just the state of coherence of the source, but also its state of polarization has a strong influence on the far-zone correlations. Different types of sources are found to have different upper bounds for the normalized HBT coefficient.