a measure of the extent to which radiation can be considered to be coherent
NOTE 1 – The magnitude of the degree of coherence is equal to the visibility, V, of the fringes of a 2-beam interference experiment:
where Smax is the irradiance at a maximum of the interference pattern, and Smin is the irradiance at a minimum.
NOTE 2 – Optical radiation is considered highly coherent when the degree of coherence exceeds 0.88, partially coherent for values less than 0.88 and incoherent for values significantly less than 0.88.
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