High-efficient and high-accurate integrated division-of-time polarimeter

Abstract

The characterization of the state of polarization is of great importance in broad applications, such as microscopy, communications, astronomy, and remote sensing. In this Letter, we propose and demonstrate a novel integrated division-of-time polarimeter (DOTP) based on a Mach–Zehnder interferometer and two photodetectors (PDs). The proposed DOTP achieves improved measuring efficiency and accuracy by measuring a pair of orthogonal polarization states simultaneously. The analysis matrix, which is used to recover the Stokes vector, is elaborately optimized to reduce the influence of the PD noise. Compared to the conventionally designed DOTP, the measuring efficiency is improved by 33% and the equally weighted variance, a figure of merit used to characterize the total variance of the Stokes vector, is also reduced by 33%. The performance of the proposed device is experimentally characterized by comparing with a commercial product. Furthermore, a method based on the least-squares method and singular value decomposition is adopted to quantize the deviation between the ideal optimal analysis matrix and the practical one.