Polarization in optical design

The polarization effects of optical interfaces are important in certain types of optical systems. These systems include polarization microscopes, remote sensing platforms, optical computers, solar magnetographs, and barcode readers. These systems are characterized by their polarization aberration function, which maps a ray's amplitude, phase, and polarization state in the entrance pupil onto its amplitude, phase, and polarization state in the exit pupil. A unified discussion of the polarization aberration is presented and several useful special cases are explored.; The most striking contributions presented in this dissertation relate to coating-induced wavefront aberrations; a theory is presented which shows that all-reflecting systems can suffer from chromatic aberration and that astigmatism can occur on-axis in radially symmetric systems. These aberrations arise because the phase shift introduced by coatings changes with angle of incidence and is different for s- and p-polarization states. An example analysis is given in which the simple coatings in a simple Cassegrain telescope introduce 0.76 waves of chromatic aberration and 0.30 waves of astigmatism.; A particularly useful contribution contained in this dissertation is a new method for deriving an aberration expansion which describes the polarization effects which can occur in radially symmetric systems. This aberration expansion describes the polarization effects in simple functional forms and allows a designer to identify each surface's contribution to the overall polarization of the system. An example calculation is presented in which a polarization aberration expansion is used to find polarization-balancing coatings for a laser collimator. These polarization-balancing coatings reduce the instrumental polarization by a factor of 10 from a similar design without polarization balancing.; A third contribution presented in this dissertation is the derivation of the average polarization in an image. Polarization aberration theory is extended to show that the average polarization of an image formed by a radially symmetric system is approximately equal to the polarization along the chief ray path.