Observation and analysis of coherent optical waves emitted from large-Fresnel number degenerate cavities.

We demonstrate that the coherent optical waves emitted from large-Fresnel-number degenerate cavities persistently display a sort of salient intensity variations. We use the representation of the coherent states to explore the origin of the salient intensity variations and find that these coherent laser waves arise from a quadrature superposition of two degenerate coherent states. With the analytical representation of the superposed coherent states, we verify that these coherent laser waves possess a large angular momentum per photon.