Selected Effects of Polarization in Optical Propagation and 3D Imaging
Date of Award
8-1-2024
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Electro-Optics
Department
Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics
Advisor/Chair
Partha Banerjee
Abstract
This dissertation is a culmination of work in two areas in optics which have a commonality, viz., polarization. The first to be discussed pertains to phase retrieval technique that combines offaxis digital holography with transport of intensity. Two applications of this method are explored that are based on polarization of light. The first is 3D polarization imaging that helps to retrieve the polarization information of the object through simultaneous recording of holograms corresponding to the vertical and horizontal polarizations. This technique is especially useful in obtaining polarization signatures from birefringent objects and can monitor the stress induced birefringence in samples. The second application of polarization is in speckle noise in the extracted phase. In our work, different holograms are recorded by changing the linear polarization state of both the object and the reference beams. It is shown that this averaging method reduces the speckle noise in the reconstructed intensity images and more importantly, on the extracted phase as well, as verified through a suitably defined contrast parameter. While the first part of the reported work assumes CW Gaussian beams, albeit polarized, have both spatially and temporally stable structure, the second part concerns optical beams with varying structure in the spatio-temporal domain. These can be treated as an extension of optical vortex beams which contain a singularity at the beam center and carry longitudinal orbital angular momentum. Spatiotemporal optical vortices have singularity in the spatio-temporal domain and can carry transverse orbital angular momentum, and are typically generated using pulsed lasers. It is shown that a partially temporally coherent source can also produce these spatiotemporal optical vortices whose transverse orbital angular momentum can change during propagation through common optical elements.
Keywords
Digital Holography, Transport of Intensity, Speckles, Optical Vortex, Spatiotemporal Optical Vortex
Rights Statement
Copyright © 2024, author.
Recommended Citation
Mirando, Dinesh Amal, "Selected Effects of Polarization in Optical Propagation and 3D Imaging" (2024). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 7420.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/graduate_theses/7420
