Full Poincar\'e polarimetry enabled through physical inference
Abstract
While polarisation sensing is vital in many areas of research, with applications spanning from microscopy to aerospace, traditional approaches are limited by method-related error amplification or accumulation, placing fundamental limitations on precision and accuracy in single-shot polarimetry. Here, we put forward a new measurement paradigm to circumvent this, introducing the notion of a universal full Poincar\'e generator to map all polarisation analyser states into a single vectorially structured light field, allowing all vector components to be analysed in a single-shot with theoretically user-defined precision. To demonstrate the advantage of our approach, we use a common GRIN optic as our mapping device and show mean errors of <1% for each vector component, enhancing the sensitivity by around three times, allowing us to sense weak polarisation aberrations not measurable by traditional single-shot techniques. Our work paves the way for next-generation polarimetry, impacting a wide variety of applications relying on weak vector measurement.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2101.09372,
title = {Full Poincar\'e polarimetry enabled through physical inference},
author = {Chao He and Jianyu Lin and Jintao Chang and Jacopo Antonello and Ben Dai and Jingyu Wang and Jiahe Cui and Ji Qi and Min Wu and Daniel S. Elson and Peng Xi and Andrew Forbes and Martin J. Booth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.09372},
year = {2022}
}