Mueller matrix ellipsometry of waveplates for control of their properties and alignment

Abstract

In this paper, the authors characterize high-order quartz waveplates in the wide spectral range (from 193 to 1700 nm) using a commercial Mueller matrix ellipsometer RC2-DI-Woollam. They demonstrate that Mueller matrix ellipsometry is a powerful tool to obtain the waveplate retardation in a wide spectral range together with azimuthal angles of optical axes with good accuracy. Moreover, they deal with depolarization caused by a finite monochromator bandwidth, which is included in the model using incoherent averaging of Mueller matrices. The application of Lu–Chipman Mueller matrix decomposition to extract depolarization from data is also demonstrated. Finally, Lu–Chipman decomposition is used to demonstrate the presence of the optical activity in quartz, which one may misinterpret with incorrect alignment of the waveplate azimuth angle.