We can think of the electric field amplitude as a vector in the complex plane, rotating
around the origin with angular velocity
. To illustrate or to help visualise the addition of several light
fields it can be useful to look at this problem using a rotating reference frame, defined as follows. A
complex number shall be defined as
so that the real part is plotted along the x-axis,
while the y-axis is used for the imaginary part. We want to construct a new coordinate system
(
,
) in which the field vector is at a constant position. This can be achieved by defining
Phasor diagrams can be especially useful to see how frequency coupling of light field amplitudes can change the type of modulation, for example, to turn phase modulation into amplitude modulation. An extensive introduction to this type of phasor diagram can be found in [39].
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