Related papers: Optimal birefringence distributions for star test …
Point Spread Function (PSF) modeling is a central part of any astronomy data analysis relying on measuring the shapes of objects. It is especially crucial for weak gravitational lensing, in order to beat down systematics and allow one to…
Birefringence, the polarization-dependent splitting of light in anisotropic crystals, enables diverse optical phenomena and advanced functionalities such as optical communication, nonlinear optics, and quantum optics. However, conventional…
Cooling down test masses to cryogenic temperatures is a way to reduce the thermal noise of gravitational wave detectors. Crystalline materials are considered the most promising materials for fabricating cryogenic test masses and their…
The spatial resolution of astronomical images is limited by atmospheric turbulence and diffraction in the telescope optics, resulting in blurred images. This makes it difficult to accurately measure the brightness of blended objects because…
Astronomical polarimetry is a powerful technique that can provide physical information sometimes difficult or impossible to obtain by any other type of observation. Almost every class of binary star can benefit from polarimetric…
Interferometric particle imaging is a widely used optical measuring technique for the sizing of poly-dispersed spherical particles like droplets and bubbles. In its conventional approach, the method is limited to forward-scattering angles…
Birefringent crystals are extensively used to manipulate polarized light. The generalized transfer matrix developed allows efficient calculation of the full polarization state of light transmitted through and reflected by a stack of…
Spectral and spatial fringes in polarized light are produced by the interference of transmitted and reflected waves at the interface between materials with different indexes of refraction. These instrumental artifacts can affect the…
We describe a rapid and direct method for regularizing, post-facto, the point-spread function (PSF) of a telescope or other imaging instrument, across its entire field of view. Imaging instruments in general blur point sources of light by…
A birefringent universe could show itself through a rotation of the plane of polarisation of the cosmic microwave background photons. This is usually investigated using polarisation $B$ modes, which is degenerate with miscalibration of the…
In any polarimetric measurement technique, enhancing the laser polarization change of a laser beam before it reaches the analyzer can help in improving the sensitivity. This can be performed using an optical component having a large linear…
Optimal error estimation is key to achieve accurate photometry and astrometry. Stellar fluxes and positions in high angular resolution images are typically measured with PSF fitting routines, such as StarFinder. However, the formal…
We describe, and test, a method of obtaining spectrally and spatially sampled Stokes polarimetry measurements based on star test polarimetry enabled by a stress engineered optic (SEO). When the SEO is placed in the pupil plane of an imaging…
Spectroastrometry is a technique which has the potential to resolve flux distributions on scales of milliarcseconds. In this study, we examine the application of spectroastrometry to binary point sources which are spatially unresolved due…
Optical-window birefringence is frequently a major obstacle in experiments measuring changes in the polarization state of light traversing a sample under investigation. It can contribute a signal indistinguishable from that due to the…
A method for photon linear polarization determination based on the measurement of the asymmetry of pairs produced by polarized photons in single crystals within the optimal intervals of pair particles energies is proposed. In difference to…
Polarized light microscopy provides unique opportunities for analyzing the molecular order in man-made and natural materials, including biological structures inside living cells, tissues, and whole organisms. 20 years ago, the LC-PolScope…
A shearing interferometer is presented which uses polarization control to shear the wavefront and to modulate the interference pattern. The shear is generated by spatial walk-off in a birefringent crystal. By adjusting the orientation of…
The first step toward doing high-precision astrometry is the measurement of individual stars in individual images, a step that is fraught with dangers when the images are undersampled. The key to avoiding systematic positional error in…
Crystalline silicon has been proposed as a new test mass material in third generation gravitational wave detectors such as the Einstein Telescope (ET). Birefringence can reduce the interferometric contrast and can produce dynamical…