On the coherence measurement of a narrow bandwidth dye laser

In this paper, we report a new technique for spatial and temporal coherence measurement of narrow bandwidth sources. In particular, coherence measurement of a narrow bandwidth dye laser using Young’s double slit method and the Fabry–Perot interferometer has been carried out. In the spatial coherence measurement, a central fringe visibility of 0.85 was observed, and from this measurement, the dye gain medium source size was estimated. The variation in the visibility with slit separation (0.1–3.0 mm) for different source sizes (0.1–0.2 mm) was also analyzed. The temporal coherence length of the tunable dye laser was measured to be 10 and 60 cm for multimode and single-mode operations, respectively. The technique, in general, can also be used for spatial and temporal measurement of broadband spectrum source.