Simulation of partially coherent light propagation using parallel computing devices

Abstract

Light acquires or loses coherence and coherence is one of the few optical observables. Spectra can be derived from coherence functions and understanding any interferometric experiment is also relying upon coherence functions. Beyond the two limiting cases (full coherence or incoherence) the coherence of light is always partial and it changes with propagation. We have implemented a code to compute the propagation of partially coherent light from the source plane to the observation plane using parallel computing devices (PCDs). In this paper, we restrict the propagation in free space only. To this end, we used the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) and the open-source toolkit PyOpenCL, which gives access to OpenCL parallel computation through Python. To test our code, we chose two coherence source models: an incoherent source and a Gaussian Schell-model source. In the former case, we divided into two different source shapes: circular and rectangular. The results were compared to the theoretical values. Our implemented code allows one to choose between the PyOpenCL implementation and a standard one, i.e using the CPU only. To test the computation time for each implementation (PyOpenCL and standard), we used several computer systems with different CPUs and GPUs. We used powers of two for the dimensions of the cross-spectral density matrix (e.g. 324, 644) and a significant speed increase is observed in the PyOpenCL implementation when compared to the standard one. This can be an important tool for studying new source models.