Full-beam spatial coherence measurements of supercontinuum generation in multimode fibers.

We study experimentally the spatial coherence across the full spatial beam profile of supercontinuum light generated in both in graded-index and step-index multimode fibers. We observe a decrease of the coherence area with an increase of the injected pump power. Numerical simulations based on linearly polarized modes and mode coupling theory are in good agreement with our experiments and indicate that the decrease of coherence area is strongly related to a change in the modal amplitude distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]