Characterization of beam splitters in the calibration of a six-channel Stokes polarimeter

Abstract

Polarization distortion in a beam splitter is a phenomenon where the polarization state of output light deviates from the theoretical expectation, which is inevitable and will result in significant errors in the optical systems. A theoretical analysis method based on Mueller matrix ellipsometry is proposed for characterizing the beam splitters and the application in the calibration of a six-channel Stokes polarimeter (SP) is shown. In this study, polarization distortions in the beam splitters including depolarization, linear birefringence, circular birefringence, linear dichroism, and circular dichroism have been considered. With the proposed method, the beam splitters are characterized by the polarization distortions and the effective optical parameters extracted. In our experiment, the Mueller matrices of two different commonly used beam splitters measured by a commercial Mueller matrix ellipsometer (MME) are consistently fitted by the proposed method and the residual errors have shown improvement compared to the conventional methods. A practical application of the proposed method is exhibited by calibrating a SP system containing two non-polarization beam splitters and three polarization beam splitters. With the proposed method introduced, the general error of the measured Stokes vector can be reduced from 3% to 1%, and the errors of the thickness measurement of standard SiO2 thin film samples are within 1 nm compared with the results reported by a commercial MME.

Remote Attitude Sensing Based on High-Speed Mueller Matrix Ellipsometry

“…The nominal frequencies of the two PEMs (II/FS47, II/FS50LR, Hinds) are 47.11 KHz and 50.00 KHz respectively, making the modulation frequency of PSG reach 100KHz. The PSA is a six-parallel-channel full Stokes polarimeter, which can detect the full Stokes vector of a polarized light with an arbitrary polarization state in several nanoseconds (Zhang et al, 2018). The sample stage consists of a pitch angle adjustment stage, a yaw angle adjustment stage and a motorized rotation stage (PRM1Z8, THORLABS), which can continuously change the roll ϕ within the range of 0~360°, and fix the yaw φ and pitch θ at an arbitrary value within the range among ±30° and ±7°, respectively.…”

“…where the superscripts "m" represents the measured matrix; the demodulation matrix A is obtained by the in-situ calibration process of the PSA (Zhang et al, 2018). The modulation matrix W is composed of the Stokes vector of the incident polarized light.…”

“…where MBSR and MBST are the reflection and transmission Mueller matrix of the NPBS, which can be in-situ calibrated before the attitude tracking (Zhang et al, 2018). ML is the Mueller matrix of the plano-convex lens.…”

Dynamic characteristics of nematic liquid crystal variable retarders investigated by a high-speed polarimetry

“…Meanwhile, the FPMS can detect all the Stokes parameters of the probing light in several nanoseconds. The polarimeter is mounted on a rotatable base so that it can be used in both transmissive mode, and reflective mode with multi-incident angles [30,31]. The experiments are carried out in a clean room with constant temperature and humidity.…”

“…The highest time resolution of the existing polarimeter is about sub-millisecond [29]. Therefore, the selfdeveloped Stokes polarimeter which has a time resolution of several nanoseconds, and can measure all the Stokes vectors in one measurement [30,31] shows advantages for the study of the rapid modulation processes of LCVRs.…”