A Study On Separating Coupled Information In Mueller Matrix

Polarization is one of the important properties of light.It is a new information dimension independent of light intensity,wavelength and phase.Our understanding and mining of polarization information is still in the beginning.The polarization state of light is particularly sensitive to sub-wavelength microscopic structure when interacting with the sample.Therefore,polarization detection have been widely applied to materials science,biomedicine and other fields.However,the direct measurements of polarization parameters often contain information from many effects,and the relationship between these parameters and the microstructure of the sample is not clear.How to quantitatively interpret useful information from polarized light measurement results has become one of the core issues in the research field of polarization optics.Jones matrix and Mueller matrix are the mathematical tools for describing the polarization properties of the sample.However,the Jones matrix cannot describe depolarization,which limits its range of application.In this paper,the main research topic is on extracting information from the Mueller matrix.We summarized the previously developed Mueller matrix information extraction techniques,and propose that the symmetry properties of the sample can be a new path that leading to polarization information extraction methods.Firstly,we focus on the problem of polarization parameters being affected by the spatial orientation of experimental setups.The theory of rotational transformation of the Mueller matrix is developed,and a set of rotational invariant polarization parameters is proposed.The physical meaning of these parameters is clarified.Furthermore,by discussing the mirror symmetry property of the sample,a set of parameters that can extract the azimuth information of the anisotropic effects in the sample is proposed.The separation of the intrinsic information and the orientation information of the sample is then realized.We validated the above conclusions by implementing Monte Carlo simulations and demonstrated their application results on the experimental data of standard samples.The paper then focuses on the complicate multiple anisotropic coexistence situation,pointing out the transpose symmetry of the Mueller matrix is related to the reciprocal symmetry property of the sample.Through systematic theoretical derivation,we have found a set of polarization markers that can distinguish the superposition status of different anisotropic effects.These indicators can help researchers visually determine whether there are mirror symmetry or reciprocity symmetry breaking in the sample.At the end of the paper,in cooperation with the French research group LPICM at Ecole Polytechnique,we carry out the research on the information extraction of the histological cuts.To solve the problem of uncertain sample thickness,the dependence of polarization parameters on thickness was determined by implementing the Mueller matrix logarithm decomposition method.To describe the new phenomena observed in the experiment,we further established the theory of rotational invariants within the logarithm decomposition framework,and successfully characterized the anisotropic depolarization effect.By comparing Monte Carlo simulations of various optical models,the contribution of different scatterers to the polarization measurement results is clarified.