English

SU(2) gadget for higher-order Poincar\'{e} sphere

Optics 2025-09-16 v1

Abstract

The combination of two quarter-wave plates and one half-wave plate, regardless of their sequential arrangement, constitutes a well-established universal SU(2) gadget capable of implementing all polarization transformations on the standard Poincar\'{e} sphere. However, there is no analogous system for realizing all polarization transformations on the higher-order Poincar\'{e} sphere, a member of a higher topological index space. This work demonstrates that an optical gadget, comprising two quarter-wave qq-plates and one half-wave qq-plate, arranged in any order, is an SU(2) gadget to realize arbitrary polarization evolution on the higher-order Poincar\'{e} sphere.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.10964,
  title  = {SU(2) gadget for higher-order Poincar\'{e} sphere},
  author = {Mohammad Umar and Paramasivam Senthilkumaran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.10964},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:34:55.122Z