Devising genuine twisted cross-spectral densities

Sticking a twist to a partially coherent source cannot be done at will, since the result can violate the definiteness property of the corresponding cross-spectral density. As a matter of fact, the study of twisted sources has been mainly concentrated on the original case proposed by Simon and Mukunda [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 10, 95 (1993)] of circularly symmetric Gaussian Schell-model sources. Here, we discuss a modeling procedure that can be used to generate numberless genuine twisted sources without symmetry constraints. As geometrically simple examples, two cases of non-Gaussian twisted sources endowed with circular or rectangular symmetry are explicitly worked out. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America