Singularities of interference of three waves
with different polarization states
Piotr Kurzynowski, Władysław A. Woźniak*, Marzena Zdunek and Monika Borwińska
Institute of Physics, Wrocław University of Technology, Wybrzeże Wyspiańskiego 27, 50-370 Wrocław Poland *wladyslaw.wozniak@pwr.wroc.pl
Abstract: We presented the interference setup which can produce interesting two-dimensional patterns in polarization state of the resulting light wave emerging from the setup. The main element of our setup is the Wollaston prism which gives two plane, linearly polarized waves (eigenwaves of both Wollaston’s wedges) with linearly changed phase difference between them (along the x-axis). The third wave coming from the second arm of proposed polarization interferometer is linearly or circularly polarized with linearly changed phase difference along the y-axis. The interference of three plane waves with different polarization states (LLL – linear-linear-linear or LLC – linear-linear-circular) and variable change difference produce two-dimensional light polarization and phase distributions with some characteristic points and lines which can be claimed to constitute singularities of different types. The aim of this article is to find all kind of these phase and polarization singularities as well as their classification. We postulated in our theoretical simulations and verified in our experiments different kinds of polarization singularities, depending on which polarization parameter was considered (the azimuth and ellipticity angles or the diagonal and phase angles). We also observed the phase singularities as well as the isolated zero intensity points which resulted from the polarization singularities when the proper analyzer was used at the end of the setup. The classification of all these singularities as well as their relationships were analyzed and described.
2012 Optical Society of America
