Mueller matrix ellipsometry of waveplates for control of their properties and alignment

Abstract

In this paper, the authors characterize high-order quartz waveplates in the wide spectral range (from 193 to 1700nm) using a commercial Mueller matrix ellipsometer RC2-DI-Woollam. They demonstrate that Mueller matrix ellipsometry is a powerful tool to obtain the waveplate retardation in a wide spectral range together with azimuthal angles of optical axes with good accuracy. Moreover, they deal with depolarization caused by a finite monochromator bandwidth, which is included in the model using incoherent averaging of Mueller matrices. The application of Lu-Chipman Mueller matrix decomposition to extract depolarization from data is also demonstrated. Finally, Lu-Chipman decomposition is used to demonstrate the presence of the optical activity in quartz, which one may misinterpret with incorrect alignment of the waveplate azimuth angle.