GENERATION OF LASER SPECKLE WITH AN INTEGRATING SPHERE

A new method for generation of laser speckle, by using an integrating sphere, is investigated. This method is of particular interest in the production of speckle patterns for modulation transfer function testing of detector arrays and would be well suited in wavelength ranges for which a transmissive diffuser is not optimum. Attributes of the speckle field investigated in this paper include the degree of polarization and first- and second-order statistics. The speckle patterns generated by the integrating sphere method are seen to closely obey the theory for statistics of speckle generated by usual means.