One-shot carrier fringe polarimeter in a double-aperture common-path interferometer

This paper presents a novel, simple, robust, and very stable polarimeter which is able to measure in a single-shot the state of polarization (SOP) of an optical field. In this proposal, an optical field with an unknown SOP and an optical field with a reference SOP are superposed by using a double aperture common-path interferometer (DACPI), obtaining two interferograms with adjustable carrier frequency in a single shot. Each interferogram has different visibility and phase-step where the information of the unknown SOP is contained. It is shown that under a typical Fourier analysis any SOP can be successfully measured without the necessity of knowing the carrier frequency. The present proposal is justified mathematically and probed experimentally. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement