Plug-and-Play Typed Polarization Direction Indicator by Azimuthal Polarizer

This work is on polarization direction visualization of linearly-polarized light. Different from using conventional rotation or multiple beam-path approaches, a more direct and popular solution is to generate the so-called “Malus pattern” and visualize the polarization direction directly by an azimuthal polarizer (AP). Several experimental configurations on the basic principle have been reported. However, there has been no proper solution to plug-and-play the AP for the measurement directly since their high-performance hardware suffered from complex coupling relations, and their algorithms relied on filtering and manual operations. The present work is for the first time to: 1) point out the problems and propose the integration of the AP as a “plug-and-play” module; 2) propose a high-performance hardware configuration without coupling relation; and 3) propose a frequency-domain algorithm with high anti-noise ability and automatic identification. All the involved issues are experimentally verified. Besides, detailed discussions on the strong anti-noise ability and the factors which might influence the measurement accuracy are also elaborated.