Recent progress in the development of dichroic Bragg coherent diffractive imaging, a new technique for simultaneous three-dimensional imaging of strain and magnetization at the nanoscale, is reported. This progress includes the installation of a diamond X-ray phase retarder at beamline 34-ID-C of the Advanced Photon Source. The performance of the phase retarder for tuning X-ray polarization is ...

We report a method for the temporal synchronization of two photoelastic light modulators. For synchronizing, we used the transistor-transistor logic output signals from each modulator, which contain the information on the light polarization. These signals were introduced in a phase-detector circuit, which provided the phase difference value between both modulators. Three optical devices were us...

A wide-view single cell gap transflective liquid-crystal display (TR-LCD) using the fringe field switching effect is proposed by incorporating a quarter-wave in-cell-retarder below the liquid-crystal (LC) cell in the reflective part. By optimizing the angle between the electrode stripes and the LC rubbing direction in the transmissive and the reflective regions, this TR-LCD exhibits a high opti...

One recently reported approach to flat panel autostereoscopic 3D displays under investigation at Sharp Laboratories of Europe Ltd. (SLE) uses a high precision patterned optical half wave retarder combined with a re-configurable output polariser to “develop” a parallax barrier structure attached to an LCD display panel. Such a barrier is invisible without the polariser and thus a 2D/3D configura...

We apply the polar decomposition of the Mueller matrix describing a liquid-crystal-on-silicon display to identify the diattenuator, depolarizer, and retarder contributions as a function of the gray level. The retarder contribution is expressed in terms of the equivalent Jones matrix to apply previous techniques to evaluate the phase modulation. This allows searching for optimized polarization c...

A high efficiency dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) is demonstrated by optimizing the dye concentration and using an electrically tunable nematic liquid crystal (NLC) phase retarder. The state of polarization of laser emission in CLC lasers, contrary to our expectations, due to the refractive index mismatch at the boundaries is not exactly circular. A double-cell structure including a ...

We present a new optical system that significantly reduces helicity-dependent instrumental intensity asymmetries. It is an extension of a previous scheme [Appl. Opt.47, 2465 (2008)], where one laser beam is split using a polarizing beam splitter into two with orthogonal linear polarizations. The beams are sent through a chopper, allowing only one to pass at a time. The two temporally separated ...

We report a spatially modulated polarimetry scheme by using zero-order vortex half-wave retarder (ZVHR) and spatial Fourier analysis method. A ZVHR is employed to analyze the input polarized light convert it into vectorial optical field, an analyzer set after form hourglass intensity pattern due polarization modulation. Then, light’s Stokes parameters can be calculated of with single shot. The ...

This paper will present a prototype of the first set of vortex retarders made of liquid crystal polymers recorded by polarization holography. Vortex retarders are birefringent plates characterized by a rotation of their fast axis. Liquid crystals possess birefringent properties and they are locally orientable. Their orientation is defined by the perpendicular to the local orientation of the rec...

The trajectory of the polarization state of a monochromatic light beam after it passes through a fixed linear polarizer and a rotating linear retarder of arbitrary retardance delta is determined on the Poincaré sphere. The three-dimensional figure-8 contour is shown to be the line of intersection of a right-circular cylinder with the sphere. The cylinder is parallel to the polar (S3) axis, touc...