Application of Flower Pollination Algorithm in Designing of a Multi-crystal Superachromatic Quarter-Wave Phase Retarder

Abstract

In the area of modern optimization techniques there exist a variety of heuristic algorithms designed to solve complex problems. In recent times researchers are focusing on some unconventional methods based on different phenomena found in nature. Flower pollination is a nature inspired pollination process of flowers. It is a very simple and flexible algorithm compared to both genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization. In the present communication we have applied this evolutionary optimization technique to design multicrystal quarter wave phase retarder in visible range of the spectrum i.e. 450–700 nm. Phase retarders are key building element in most of the optical systems that shows wavelength dependent phase retardation. But the challenging task for an optical system designer is to design such an achromatic retarder where retardation will be almost independent of wavelength. Our proposed system consists of four birefringent plates having KDP, crystalline quartz, ADP and CdSe crystals with good transmittance over 450–700 nm range. Simulation results shows that the present optimizing algorithm for thickness optimization minimized the wavelength dependency in a very simple way.