Tunable bandwidth optical rotator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tunable optical polarization rotator using an array of half-wave plates, capable of rotating polarization at any desired angle over broad or narrow spectral bandwidths, with experimental validation.

Contribution

It presents a novel composite design of polarization rotators with tunable angles using standard half-wave plates, demonstrating experimental performance for different configurations.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated polarization rotation at arbitrary angles.

Achieved broad and narrow spectral bandwidth operation.

Validated performance with experimental results for 6 and 10 plate configurations.

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel type of polarization rotator which is capable of rotating the polarization plane of a linearly polarized light at any desired angle in either broad or narrow spectral bandwidth. The rotator comprises an array of standard half-wave plates rotated at specific angles with respect to their fast-polarization axes. The performance of the rotator depends on the number of individual half-wave plates and in this paper we experimentally investigate the performance of two composite rotators comprising six and ten half-wave plates.