Generation of a coherent light beam with precise and fast dynamic control of the state and degree of polarization

Noé Ortega-Quijano, Julien Fade, François Parnet, and Mehdi Alouini

Index: 10.1364/OL.42.002898

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Abstract

Recent developments of polarized light sources with tunable state and degree of polarization (SOP and DOP) inherently provide a temporally incoherent beam, which makes them unsuitable for applications like interferometry. We present a method for generating a coherent beam with full, precise, and independent control of the SOP and DOP. Our approach is based on an imbalanced dual-frequency dual-polarization light source. We demonstrate that it offers three different working regimes, respectively providing perfectly depolarized light, DOP modulated light, or fully polarized light with a deterministic SOP trajectory. A simple implementation of this versatile approach is described and experimentally validated.