While several analyses of polarimeter noise-reduction have been published, little data has been presented to support the analytical results, particularly for a laser polarimeter based on measurements taken at discrete, independent rotation angles of two birefringent waveplates. This paper derives and experimentally demonstrates the reduction of both system and speckle noise in this type of laser polarimeter, achieved by optimizing the rotation angles of the waveplates by minimizing the condition numbers of the appropriate matrix equation. Results are demonstrated experimentally in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) variations for a range of materials and spatial bandwidths. Use of optimal waveplate angles is found to improve the average SNR of the normalized Mueller matrix over speckle by a factor of up to 8 for a non-depolarizing material, but to provide little improvement for a depolarizing material. In the limit of zero spatial bandwidth, the average SNR of the normalized Mueller matrix over speckle is found to be greater than one for a non-depolarizing material and less than one for a depolarizing material.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a method for establishing secure cryptographic keys between two parties who share an optical, "quantum" channel and an authenticated classical channel. To share such keys across the globe, space-based links are required and in the near term these will take the form of trusted node, key management satellites. We consider such channels between two nanosatellite spacecraft for polarization entanglement-based QKD, and the optical channel is described in detail. Quantum channels between satellites are useful for balancing keys within constellations of trusted node QKD satellites and, in the future, may have applications in long-distance qubit exchange between quantum computers and in fundamental physics experiments. The nanosatellite mission proposed uses an optical link with 80-mm diameter optical terminals. If such a link could be maintained with 10-μrad pointing accuracy, then this would allow QKD to be performed for satellite separations up to around 400 km. A potential pointing and tracking system is also described although currently this design would likely limit the satellite separation to 100 to 150 km.

No abstract

The visualization of polarimetric data is often done by color mapping the linear parameters using the three channels in the HSV color space. Because this color space is not an accurate model of human color perception, the resulting visualization mixes the perceptual channels and contains nonuniformity. To the best of our knowledge, we present a new mapping strategy that reliably and accurately depicts reality by placing the polarization parameters directly into the perceptually uniform channels of CAM02-UCS. This mapping also ensures that regions of high polarization will be more visible, even when the measured irradiance is low.