Statistics of heterodyction of Gaussian light

Discusses the statistical properties of the intensity fluctuations of light fields consisting of an incoherent Gaussian component heterodyned with a single-frequency coherent beam. The second moment of the intensity- fluctuation distribution is obtained in an analytic form for a Lorentzian incoherent spectrum for arbitrary values of the bandwidth and frequency displacement from the coherent mode. The analysis includes as special cases many of the exact results obtained in statistical optics over the last decade.