A long-standing question in optics has been to efficiently measure the phase (or wavefront) of an optical field. This has led to numerous publications and commercial devices such as phase shift interferometry, wavefront reconstruction via modal decomposition and Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors. In this work we develop a new technique to extract the phase which in contrast to previously mentioned methods is based on polarization (or Stokes) measurements. We outline a simple, all-digital approach using only a spatial light modulator and a polarization grating to exploit the amplitude and phase relationship between the orthogonal states of polarization to determine the phase of an optical field. We implement this technique to reconstruct the phase of static and propagating optical vortices.

Date Published: 25 September 2014
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9194, Laser Beam Shaping XV, 91940C (25 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2060568

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9194:
Laser Beam Shaping XV
Andrew Forbes; Todd E. Lizotte, Editor(s)