Dual-rotator mueller matrix polarimeter for high-accuracy and high-precision measurements of glucose concentration

Abstract

A Mueller matrix polarimeter incorporating two rotating retarders is proposed for determining the glucose concentration in aqueous solutions. In the proposed system, the accuracy and precision of the Mueller matrix measurements are enhanced through an effective compensation of both the systematic errors in the polarimeter and the environmental errors. Moreover, the synchronization of the two retarders is effectively controlled through the use of a simple discontinuous rotation strategy. The validity of the proposed compensation method is demonstrated numerically and experimentally using an air sample for illustration purposes. It is shown that the maximum error and maximum standard deviation of the measured Mueller matrix elements are ±0.0102 and ±0.0008, respectively. In addition, the response time is just 1 min. In experimental trials performed in the transmission mode using aqueous glucose samples, the maximum standard deviation of the optical rotation angle is found to be just 0.0388 degrees with a path length of 40 mm. Moreover, the extracted rotation angle varies linearly (R2 = 0.9176) with the glucose concentration over the concentration range of 100–500 mg/dL. Hence, the feasibility of the calibrated Mueller matrix polarimeter for glucose determination applications is confirmed.