ABSTRACT

Many optical systems, such as liquid crystal displays and optics for microlithography, are polarization critical optical systems because they present polarization challenges and have specifications which are difficult to meet. Polarization engineering is the task of designing, fabricating, testing, and often mass producing with high yield, such polarization critical optical systems. Polarization is a problem in many systems due to variations of coating, filter, grating, polarizer, and retarder polarization with angle and wavelength, causing polarization aberrations. Stress birefringence in molded optics causes complex retardance aberrations and these systems will have will have different interferograms in different polarization states. Mueller matrix polarimeters measure polarization elements, optical system, liquid crystal cells, and biological imaging. Polarization ray tracing calculates the polarization states exiting from optical systems and determines the polarization properties, the diattenuation, retardance, and depolarization, associated with the ray paths. High numerical aperture beams must have polarization variations, because the polarization state, which is transverse to the wavefront, cannot remain uniform in 3-dimensions. The polarization state must curve around the wavefront causing detrimental broadening of the image from the ideal diffraction-limited patterns.