Tunable bandwidth optical rotator

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel type of polarization rotator that is capable of rotating the polarization plane of a linearly polarized light at any desired angle in either broad or narrow spectral bandwidth. The rotator comprises an array of standard half-wave plates rotated at specific angles with respect to their fast-polarization axes. The performance of the rotator depends on the number of individual half-wave plates, and in this paper we experimentally investigate the performance of two composite rotators comprising 6 and 10 half-wave plates.