Polarization distributions and degree of polarization for quantum Gaussian light fields

We examine polarization properties of electromagnetic field states with Gaussian complex-amplitude distributions, such as quadrature coherent and squeezed states, thermal chaotic states, and two-mode squeezed vacuum states. We compute their polarization distribution and we apply to them diverse measures of degree of polarization and polarization fluctuations. This allows us to investigate the main properties of the degrees of polarization introduced so far. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.