Abstract
The structure of the degree of coherence of wide-sense statistically stationary planar sources radiating far fields with intensity patterns with azimuthal dependence is determined, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time. The Fourier series basis is used in decomposing arbitrary far-field intensity for obtaining the azimuthal modes, which are shown to correspond to the spatial frequency components of the source degree of coherence. The far fields with azimuthal structure can be produced experimentally with the help of spatial light modulators.
