Tunable beam displacer

TL;DR

This paper presents a tunable beam displacer device that uses a polarizing beam splitter and mirrors to produce two parallel, orthogonally polarized beams with adjustable separation, useful for various optical applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel, simple, and tunable beam displacer design that allows continuous control of beam separation without optical path difference.

Findings

The device achieves continuous tunability of beam separation.

The maximum separation depends on the PBS characteristics.

The output beams are orthogonally polarized with no optical path difference.

Abstract

We report the implementation of a tunable beam displacer, composed of a polarizing beam splitter (PBS) and two mirrors, that divides an initially polarized beam into two parallel beams whose separation can be continuously tuned. The two output beams are linearly polarized with either vertical or horizontal polarization and no optical path difference is introduced between them. The wavelength dependence of the device as well as the maximum separation between the beams achievable is limited mainly by the PBS characteristics.