Optical systems for controlled specular depolarization

Abstract

Optical coatings are known to be highly polarizing at oblique incidence. On the other hand, they cannot reduce the degree of polarization of light. We show how to overcome this difficulty and reach spatial depolarization with significant efficiency. Applications concern space optical systems.

Broadband loss-less optical thin-film depolarizing devices

“…More exactly, we are interested in the transverse variations of the polarimetric phase difference ∆δ = δ s − δ p (see Fig. 1), which is known to be a key parameter for the control of light polarization [8,9]. There are different ways to design and produce such optical device, and among them are thin film interferential filters [24] (planar multilayers); indeed transverse gradients of optical thickness can be easily produced with these techniques when one takes advantage of non-uniformity effects within the vacuum chamber [25,26].…”

“…Polarized light is usually considered to be an added value and is often used to improve the observation of samples and scenes, due to optimization processes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . However there is a number of situations where this light property must be cancelled, that is, where polarized light (dop = 1) must be turned into unpolarized light (dop = 0), with dop the polarization degree.…”

Optimization design and performance analysis of quaternion spatial pseudo-depolarizer

“…The analysis of the depolarization degree is generally based on the Mueller matrix [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ] and coherence matrix [ 11 , 12 , 13 ]. However, the theoretical analysis method is quite complex in the case of a depolarizer with multiple structures [ 14 , 15 ]. A common type of quaternion spatial pseudo-depolarizer (dual Babinet compensator depolarizer) was analyzed in Ref.…”