Polarized Light

G. Ramachandran, A. R. Usha Devi, N S Saandeep +1 more

Dongshi Guan, Jun Xiong, Su-Heng Zhang +2 more

This article studies,both theoretically and experimentally,how the degree of polarization and the polarization state of polarized light affect the normalized second order correlation g(2) in Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiment.In the experiment,the plane polarized light is changed into elliptically polarized light by passing it through a 1/4 wave plate.By rotating the wave plate,the polarization state of light can be changed.Two beams of light with mutually perpendicular vibration direction,same propagation direction and random phase difference are compounded into a partly polarized light.By adjusting the intensity of one beam of the light,the degree of polarization can be changed.It is shown that for polarized light,the state of polarization causes no change in g(2).On the other hand,for light with different degrees of polarization(P),g(2) is a quadratic function of P.For natural light,P=0,and the maximum g(2) in theory is 1.5;for polarized light,P=1,and the maximum g(2) in theory is 2.

Xinxin Peng, Yinmin Zhou, Lianhua Li +3 more

Abstract The polarization of light affected by the birefringence of optical elements, such as vapor cell walls, mirrors, and windows, may introduce systematic errors that can be minimized by precisely measuring and correcting the light polarization with a highly sensitive atomic polarimeter. In high precision measurements, it is necessary to measure the light polarization with a high precision where the light interacts with atoms. However, it is inconvenient or even impossible to use the presented method to measure the light polarization, for example, in a cell or cavity. We present a precise and relatively straightforward method to measure the light polarization based on a cesium (Cs) atomic magnetometer configuration. The pump-probe scheme is involved in our experiment. The pump light polarizes atomic spins and the probe light measures the spins polarization. The optical rotation of the probe light significantly depends on the pump light ellipticity, which can be used to measure the light polarization with a high precision. In our work, we present a method to measure the pump light ellipticity with a sensitivity of 2.1 × 10 −8 rad Hz −1/2 for linearly polarized light, which has approximately an order of magnitude improvement than previous research results.

Philip R. Wallace

Alfredo Luis

We address a quantitative determination of the degree of polarization of type-II unpolarized light via the computation of the distance between the polarization distribution and the uniform distribution associated with fully unpolarized light (i.e., type-I unpolarized light or natural light). We determine the maximum degree of polarization for type-II unpolarized light and the states reaching it. We show that the degree of polarization can be arbitrarily large, approaching complete polarization for increasing mean photon numbers.

Osama M. Raisuddin, Suvranu De