High-efficient and high-accurate integrated division-of-time polarimeter

Abstract

The characterization of the state of polarization is of great importance in broad applications, such as microscopy, communications, astronomy, and remote sensing. In this Letter, we propose and demonstrate a novel integrated division-of-time polarimeter (DOTP) based on a Mach–Zehnder interferometer and two photodetectors (PDs). The proposed DOTP achieves improved measuring efficiency and accuracy by measuring a pair of orthogonal polarization states simultaneously. The analysis matrix, which is used to recover the Stokes vector, is elaborately optimized to reduce the influence of the PD noise. Compared to the conventionally designed DOTP, the measuring efficiency is improved by 33% and the equally weighted variance, a figure of merit used to characterize the total variance of the Stokes vector, is also reduced by 33%. The performance of the proposed device is experimentally characterized by comparing with a commercial product. Furthermore, a method based on the least-squares method and singular value decomposition is adopted to quantize the deviation between the ideal optimal analysis matrix and the practical one.

High Performance Polarization‐Resolved Photodetectors Based on Intrinsically Stretchable Organic Semiconductors

“…Each row of W is a 1 × 4 vector determined by the configuration of each polarization detector. [ 44 ] In the proposed polarimeter, the film orientation angles of four photodetectors with respect to the y ‐axis are 0°, 45°, 0° and 60°, corresponding to four vectors: V 1 = R 1 × (1, ε , 0, 0) T , $${V}_2 = {R}_2 \times {( {1,{\rm{\varepsilon }}/\sqrt 2 ,{\rm{\varepsilon }}/\sqrt 2 ,0} )}^T$$, V 3 = R 3 × (1, 0, 0, ε ) T and V 4 = R 4 × (1, 0, 0.866* ε , − ε /2) T , where R 1 , R 2 , R 3 and R 4 is the R ∥ of four photodetectors, ε is a coefficient between 0 and 1, relating to the DR of OPDs: $$$$\begin{equation} \varepsilon = 1 - \frac{1}{{DR}}\end{equation}$$$$…”

“…Each row of W is a 1 × 4 vector determined by the configuration of each polarization detector. [44] In the proposed polarimeter, the film orientation angles of four photodetectors with respect to the y-axis are 0°, 45°, 0°and 60°, corresponding to four…”

Full-Stokes Retrieving and Configuration Optimization in a Time-Integration Imaging Polarimeter

“…The DoTP is the most traditional imaging polarimeter design, which consists of a rotating retarder and a fixed polarizer to measure the full-Stokes vector of incident light [14]. This kind of DoTP collects the total intensity of each polarization component by a photodetector, ensuring the high and uniform signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and extinction ratio, which make them achieve higher theoretical measuring accuracy [15] and great fit for high-sensitive measuring scenarios [16]. However, it has often been classified as a stationary imaging polarimeter, because the fast axis and its retardance of the used retarders is optimized beforehand, and the light intensities must be detected at the optimal pre-determined angles [17].…”

A new polarization direction measurement via local Radon transform and error correction

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Polarization is an essential property of the light. It is important to measure the polarization state in many applications, such as remote sensing [1-3], biomedicine [4,5], sky polarized light navigation [6], fluorescence polarization immunoassay [7], ellipsometry [8-10], seismic acquisition [11] and so on.The state-of-the-art methods for polarization measurement can be summarized as four typical classes, interferometric polarimeter [12,13], temporally modulated polarimeter [14,15], division-of-amplitude polarimeter [16,17] and spatially modulated polarimeter [6,10,[18][19][20][21][22][23]. The first three families of methods need to carry out a serial of measurements with different orthogonal states of polarization.

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“…The state-of-the-art methods for polarization measurement can be summarized as four typical classes, interferometric polarimeter [12,13], temporally modulated polarimeter [14,15], division-of-amplitude polarimeter [16,17] and spatially modulated polarimeter [6,10,[18][19][20][21][22][23]. The first three families of methods need to carry out a serial of measurements with different orthogonal states of polarization.…”