ABSTRACT
Lasers are ubiquitous in modern society. They transmit the vast bulk of all information on the internet through fiber optics, are commonly used for medical tasks from dentistry to surgery, play crucial roles in everyday technologies like printing and manufacturing, and are common in almost all disciplines of scientific inquiry. The collimated beam serves as a reference to reveal the phase of the focused beam through interference. Getting a basic understanding of how to manipulate and control them is an essential task for most experimental disciplines. A wave plate is made from a birefringent crystal wherein the index of refraction that light experiences depends on the orientation of its polarization. Wave plates have the appearance of thin windows and do not absorb light. Rather, a wave plate introduces a relative phase delay between field components oriented along the slow axis and the fast axis. These two axes are associated with higher and lower refractive indices, respectively.
