Propagation of Partially Coherent Beams in Absorbing Media

The propagation of Hermite-Gauss beams in absorbing media has been studied. The beam attenuation has been demonstrated to increase with the beam order index. As a consequence, during the propagation in absorbing media, the degree of global coherence increases for the whole class of beams that can be expanded into a series of Hermite-Gauss functions. Numerical simulations are presented. An application to multimode lasers is also considered.