Extraction of effective parameters of anisotropic optical materials using a decoupled analytical method

Abstract

A decoupled analytical technique based on the Mueller matrix method and the Stokes parameters is proposed for extracting effective parameters of anisotropic optical materials in linear birefringence (LB), linear dichroism (LD), circular birefrinegence (CB), and circular dichroism (CD) properties. This technique is essential in determining the optical properties of opto-electric or biomedical materials for the development of advanced inspection and/or diagnostic applications. The error and resolution analysis of the proposed approach is demonstrated by extracting the effective parameters given an assumption of errors ranging ± 0.005 in the values of the output Stokes parameters. The results confirm the ability of the proposed method to yield full-range measurements of all the optical parameters. The decoupled nature of the analytical model yields several important advantages, including an improved accuracy and the ability to extract the parameters of optical samples with only LB, CB, LD, or CD property without using compensation technique or pretreatment. Moreover, by decoupling the extraction process, the "multiple solutions" problem inherent in previous models presented by the current group is avoided.