Optical frequency shifter for heterodyne interferometers using multiple rotating polarization retarders.

Twyman-Green. This Letter describes a method by which the frequency shift equals 4N times the rotation rate, where N is the number of rotating components available. The advantage of this method over previously described methods is that a higher heterodyne frequency is possible than with the previously described techniques. Let the light entering an interferometer, shown in Fig. 1, be separated into two orthogonal linear polarizations using, for example, a polarization beam splitter P. Each component travels a separate path through the interferometer cavity seeing a different optical phase retardation. Upon recombination the light passes through the frequency shifter and onto a detector plane, where the temporally varying optical signal has a phase equal to the net phase difference between the two paths inside the interferometer. The frequency shifter, which we shall describe using Jones calculus 3 and the complex wave representation of light, consists of a stationary quarterwave plate (QS) followed by a series of rotating halfwave plates (Hr) separated by stationary halfwave plates (HS), followed by a stationary linear polarizer (LS). The following analysis demonstrates a frequency shift of eight times the rotation rate of the halfwave plates. We begin by treating the horizontal (X) component, which we represent by