Coherence properties of Stokes beams

A Stokes beam is a light beam which is expressible as a superposition of a completely polarized and a completely unpolarized beam. In this note we study coherence properties of a wide class of beams of this kind. The behaviors of the degree of coherence of a Stokes beam produced by a circular planar source are expressed in terms of Lommel functions and theoretical results are illustrated by computed examples.