On an investigation of Tatarskii into the relationship between coherence theory and the theory of radiative transfer*

In an investigation into the foundations of the theory of radiative energy transfer, Tatarskii (1971) postulated a certain relationship between the specific intensity of radiation and a second-order coherence function of the wavefield. It is shown in the present paper that for propagation in free space, Tatarskii’s assumption restricts the validity of his theory to fields that are statistically homogeneous.