2013/03/07 by Magnus Karlsson, Karlsson, Magnus
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics and Sensor Technology #Optical Network Technologies #Optical Polarization and Ellipsometry #Optical and Acousto-Optic Technologies #Optics (physics.optics) #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Photorefractive and Nonlinear Optics #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1303.1836
17 pages, 2 figs
arxiv created 2013/03/07 · openalex publication_date 2013/03/07 · arxiv updated 2013/03/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We review the well-known polarization optics matrix methods, i.e., Jones and Stokes-Mueller calculus, and show how they can be formulated in terms of four-dimensional (4d) rotations of the four independent electromagnetic field quadratures. Since 4d rotations is a richer description than the conventional Jones and Stokes-Mueller calculi, having six rather than four degrees of freedom (DOF), we propose an extension of those calculi to handle all six DOF. For the Stokes-Mueller analysis, this leads to a novel and potentially useful extension that accounts for the absolute phase of the optical field, and which can be valuable in the areas where the optical phase is of interest, e.g. interferometry or coherent communications. As examples of the usefulness we use the formalism to explain the Pancharatnam phase by parallel transport, and shows its connection with the Berry phase. In addition we show that the two extra DOF in the 4d description represents unphysical transformations, forbidden for propagating photons, since they will not obey the fundamental quantum mechanical boson commutation relations.