Polarization microscopy by use of digital holography: application to optical-fiber birefringence measurements

Abstract

We present a digital holographic microscope that permits one to image polarization state. This technique results from the coupling of digital holographic microscopy and polarization digital holography. The interference between two orthogonally polarized reference waves and the wave transmitted by a microscopic sample, magnified by a microscope objective, is recorded on a CCD camera. The off-axis geometry permits one to reconstruct separately from this single hologram two wavefronts that are used to image the object-wave Jones vector. We applied this technique to image the birefringence of a bent fiber. To evaluate the precision of the phase-difference measurement, the birefringence induced by internal stress in an optical fiber is measured and compared to the birefringence profile captured by a standard method, which had been developed to obtain high-resolution birefringence profiles of optical fibers.

Digital Holographic Interferometric Characterization of Optical Waveguides

“…The high performance of DHI was tested by measurements of low variation refractive indices of fluids in a comparative study with other techniques (Dubois et al, 1999;Owen & Zozulya, 2002) like traditional MachZehnder interferometry. The coupling of digital holographic microscopy and polarization imaging digital holography was demonstrated in an investigation of induced birefringence in non striped bent optical fibres and the birefringence of stressed PMMA (Cuche et al, 1999;Colomb et al, 2002Colomb et al, , 2005. The mathematics describing the refractive index of transparent materials used in (Dubois et al, 1999;Owen & Zozulya, 2002;De Angelis et al, 2006;Hossain et al, 2006) cannot be used directly to measure and configure the refractive index profile of GRIN optical waveguides, since it assumes a constant refractive index along the light path in a material.…”

Imaging polarimetry for the determination of stress constraint in transparent solids

“…There is considerable interest in spatially quantifying the parameters describing optical anisotropy [3][4][5][6][7]. Many living biological specimens [4][5][6][7][8] as well as photonic devices [8][9][10] exhibit low-level birefringence eventually induced by stresses.…”

“…Many living biological specimens [4][5][6][7][8] as well as photonic devices [8][9][10] exhibit low-level birefringence eventually induced by stresses. For instance, the determination of stresses in transparent thin plates (or films) plays an important role in optoelectronic technologies.…”

“…Several techniques for determining the optical birefringence have been used including compensatorbased methods [7,11,12], interferometric setups [3,6,8,13], and mostly polarimetric experiments [4,5,14].…”

Development and characterization of novel nanobiocomposites containing various nanofillers to improve barrier and other physical properties of interest in food packaging and coating applications

“…It is evident that given the relatively large size of the fibers, the difficult observation of these must be attributed to a limitation of the SEM technique to resolve between the two components, filler and matrix, particularly when the dispersion of the filler and phase continuity seems high. However, the best techniques to resolve the morphology of the fibers in the biopolymer matrixes turned out to be in this study polarized optical microscopy (Colomb et al, 2005) and Raman imaging. Polarized optical light microscopy photographs allowed to take clear images of the cellulose fibers embedded in the biodegradable matrixes.…”