Statistical Properties of Optical Fields Scattered by Random Media Application to Rotating Ground Glass

Abstract

We give a sufficient condition for the field scattered from a surface (S) illuminated by a laser beam to be a stationary gaussian field. This condition is fulfilled for the optical shot noise. As an example we calculate the spectrum of the field scattered from a granular surface. We show that it does not depend on the statistical properties of (S) when the number of grains tends to infinity.