2021/01/22 by Chao He, Jianyu Lin, He, Chao +23 · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #Spectroscopy Techniques in Biomedical and Chemical Research #Advanced Optical Sensing Technologies #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2101.09372
While polarisation sensing is vital in many areas of research, with applications spanning from microscopy to aerospace, traditional approaches are limited by method-related error amplification or accumulation, placing fundamental limitations on precision and accuracy in single-shot polarimetry. Here, we put forward a new measurement paradigm to circumvent this, introducing the notion of a universal full Poincaré generator to map all polarisation analyser states into a single vectorially structured light field, allowing all vector components to be analysed in a single-shot with theoretically user-defined precision. To demonstrate the advantage of our approach, we use a common GRIN optic as our mapping device and show mean errors of <1% for each vector component, enhancing the sensitivity by around three times, allowing us to sense weak polarisation aberrations not measurable by traditional single-shot techniques. Our work paves the way for next-generation polarimetry, impacting a wide variety of applications relying on weak vector measurement.