Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Scattering mechanism for quadratic evolution of depolarization

Published

Author(s)

Thomas A. Germer

Abstract

It was recently demonstrated theoretically, when the polarimetric properties of a material depend only upon the direction transverse to that of propagation (long coherence length regime), depolarization in transmission evolves quadratically with material thickness. This behavior was observed in at least four experimental studies. However, some of these studies unlikely satisfy the long coherence length condition under which the theory applies. Here, we demonstrate that abandoning a unidirectional approach to the propagation of light through a medium, i.e., introducing scatter, causes quadratic depolarization to occur in the short coherence length regime.
Citation
Optics Letters
Volume
45
Issue
2

Keywords

depolarization, Mueller matrix, polarimetry, scattering

Citation

Germer, T. (2020), Scattering mechanism for quadratic evolution of depolarization, Optics Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.383215 (Accessed October 12, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created January 14, 2020, Updated July 10, 2020