Détermination simultanée de la retardance et la position des axes rapide et lent d'une lame biréfringente

Abstract

Birefringent plates such as quarter wave, half wave ..., are basic optical elements that change the polarization state of a light passing through it. They have become one of the most widely used optical components in the field of optical polarization, laser modulation, and optical communications. A Birefringent plate is generally designed to impose a specified phase delay shift between two orthogonal polarization components. Therefore, it is necessary to characterize the birefringent slide before use and especially for precision measurements. We want to present in this work a compensation method that allows to simultaneously measure the phase delay and the position of the fast axis of a Birefringent plate whose eigenstates are linear and elliptical, based in this study on the determination phase delay induced by reflection on the surface of a prism. The main advantages of this method are its experimental simplicity, easier operation, at lower cost, and in order to validate this method, an application has been made in the polymer field, by determining the different polarimetric properties of a polypropylene film