Quasi-stationary plane-wave optical pulses and the van Cittert-Zernike theorem in time.
We study the properties of quasi-stationary, partially coherent, plane-wave optical pulses in the space-time and space-frequency domains. A generalized van Cittert-Zernike theorem in time is derived to describe the propagation of the coherence function of quasi-stationary pulses. The theory is applied to rectangular pulses chopped from a stationary light source, and the evolution characteristics of such pulse trains with different states of coherence are discussed and illustrated with numerical examples.