Spatiotemporal supermodes: Rapid reduction of spatial coherence in highly multimode lasers

Spatial coherence quantifies spatial field correlations and is one of the fundamental properties of light. Here we investigate the spatial coherence of highly multimode lasers in the regime of short timescales. Counterintuitively, we show that in this regime, the temporal (longitudinal) modes play a crucial role in spatial coherence reduction. To evaluate the spatial coherence we measured the temporal dynamics of speckle fields generated by a highly multimode laser with over ${10}^{5}$ lasing spatial (transverse) modes and examined the dependence of speckle contrast on the exposure time of the detecting device. We show that in the regime of short timescales, the spatial and temporal modes interact to form spatiotemporal supermodes, such that the spatial degrees of freedom are encoded onto the temporal modes. As a result, the speckle contrast is suppressed according to the number of temporal modes, and the degree of spatial coherence is reduced. Moreover, the functional form of the spatial coherence is shown to have a bimodal distribution. In the regime of long timescales, the supermodes are no longer a valid representation of the laser modal structure. Consequently, the spatial coherence is independent of the temporal modes, and the classical result, where the speckle contrast is suppressed according to the number of spatial modes, is obtained. Due to this spatiotemporal mechanism, highly multimode lasers can be used for speckle suppression in high-speed full-field imaging applications, as we demonstrate here for imaging of a fast moving object.