Impact of intensity integration time distribution on the measurement precision of Mueller polarimetry

Abstract

Mueller polarimetry is an important technology to characterize the physical property of materials (such as thin films and scattering particles etc.). Therefore, the high measurement precision is significant for various applications. In this paper, a modified model considering integration time of intensity measurement is proposed to verify the impact of intensity integration time distribution on the measurement precision of Mueller polarimetry. In the presence of additive Gaussian noise, the optimal integration time distribution, which is determined by instrument matrix, that minimizes the noise propagation (and thus estimation variance) is also proposed for both complete Mueller matrix polarimetry and some common partial (or incomplete) Mueller matrix polarimetry. Furthermore, we found that the estimation variance can be further reduced by optimizing the integration time distribution for some given instrument matrices. However, we also verify that, for the first time to our knowledge, the existing minimal estimation variance, and thus the upper bound of measurement precision cannot be broken by optimizing intensity integration time distribution.