31 August 2021 Design of a frequency-independent optic axis Pancharatnam-based achromatic half-wave plate
Kunimoto Komatsu, Hirokazu Ishino, Nobuhiko Katayama, Tomotake Matsumura, Yuki Sakurai
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Abstract

Pancharatnam-based achromatic half-wave plates (AHWP) achieve high polarization efficiency over a broad waveband. These AWHPs generally contain a property whereby the optic axis is dependent on the electromagnetic frequency of the incident radiation. When the AHWP is used to measure incident polarized radiation with a finite detection bandwidth, this frequency dependence causes an uncertainty in the determination of the polarization angle due to the limited knowledge of the shape of the source spectrum and detection band. To mitigate this problem, we propose new designs of the AHWP that eliminate the frequency dependence of the optic axis over the bandwidth while maintaining high modulation efficiency. We carried out this optimization by tuning the relative angles among the individual half-wave plates of the five and nine layer AHWPs. The optimized set of relative angles achieves a frequency-independent optic axis over the fractional bandwidth, a bandwidth over which polarization efficiency is greater than 0.9, of 1.3 and 1.5 for the five- and nine-layer AHWPs, respectively. We also study the susceptibility of the alignment accuracy on the polarization efficiency and the frequency dependence of the optic axis, which provides a design guidance for each application.

© 2021 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2329-4124/2021/$28.00 © 2021 SPIE
Kunimoto Komatsu, Hirokazu Ishino, Nobuhiko Katayama, Tomotake Matsumura, and Yuki Sakurai "Design of a frequency-independent optic axis Pancharatnam-based achromatic half-wave plate," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 7(3), 034005 (31 August 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.7.3.034005
Received: 16 April 2021; Accepted: 16 August 2021; Published: 31 August 2021
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Cited by 2 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Polarization

Wave plates

Optical alignment

Polarimetry

Telescopes

Sapphire

Sensors

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