Discussion Question 13C P112, Week 13 Quarter Wave Plates A quarter wave plate (QWP) is an example of a birefringent device:

its refractive index n depends on the polarization of incoming light. If light is polarized along the fast axis, it will experience a smaller refractive index but if it is polarized along the slow axis, the refractive index it sees will be larger. Recall that the index of refraction describes the degree to which light slows down in a material: v = c / n. So here is how a birefringent element works: if linearly polarized light passes through the element, the component of the light polarized along the slow axis will be slowed down more that the component along the fast axis. Thus, when the light emerges from the element, its two components will be out of phase with each other. A QWP is a special case of such a device, where the phase shift between the fast and slow components is exactly 90. Further, if the incoming light is polarized at 45 to both the fast and slow axes (so that the fast and slow components are of equal amplitude), the outgoing light will be circularly polarized. Consider a single QWP that lies in the xy plane. It is oriented so that its fast axis lies along the y direction and its slow axis lies along the x axis. We will send light of various types at this QWP, but the light will always be traveling in the +z direction. (a) Find the polarization state of the light transmitted by the QWP in each of the following cases. If your answer is linearly polarized, be sure to specify the direction of linear polarization. 1. The incident light is linearly polarized in the y direction. still linearly polarized in y direction
y ) / 2 2. The incident light is linearly polarized in the direction ( x circularly polarized

3. The incident light is unpolarized. still unpolarized 4. The incident light is circularly polarized. polarized with equal components along x & y directions

(b) Given your answer to part 4 above, what sort of device would you have if you glued two identical QWPs together? And what if you glued four of them together?

Each QWP changes the phase of the slow component relative to the fast component by a /2. If you do this twice you get a phase change of which is equivalent to changing the sign of the slow component relative to the fast component. This means the polarization direction is reflected about either the fast or slow axis. If you do this 4 times the change is 2 which is equivalent to doing nothing to the polarization.

(c) Suppose the incident light has intensity I0 = 5 W/m2. Find the intensity I of the transmitted light in each of the following cases: 1. The incident light is linearly polarized in the y direction. y ) / 2 2. The incident light is linearly polarized in the direction ( x 3. The incident light is unpolarized. 4. The incident light is circularly polarized.

all have intensity 5 W/m2.

Notice a trend?

(d) Now for a challenge: lets design a QWP! You will build your QWP from crystalline quartz (SiO2), a common birefringent material. Your task is to deterime how thick your plate of quartz needs to be to make a QWP. As you will quickly discover, you need one more parameter: the frequency of the incident light QWPs only function properly at certain frequencies. So lets use the blue-green line at = 488 nm produced by an ArgonIon laser. At this wavelength, the fast and slow indices of refraction of crystalline quartz are nf = 1.54955 and ns = 1.55885 respectively. How thick should your QWP be? Note: the given = 488 nm is the lasers wavelength in vacuum, not in the material.

additional hint: set = f - s = / 2, where is the total angle the waves travels through in the material

The phase shift that a wave gets going through a slab of thickness d through the two media are: 2 n f 2 ns 2 d= d ; f = d s =

Our condition for a QWP is

s f =
d=

d ( ns n f ) =

d =

4 ( ns n f

488 109 = 13.1 m 1.55885 1.54955

(e) I suspect that you came up with a very small thickness. In practice, optical elements cannot be machined too thin, or they will be mechanically unstable (i.e. they break too easily to be practical!). A conservative minimum thickness is 1 mm. Is there some other thickness that you could use for your QWP that is 1 mm but still works at = 488 nm? In fact, there is a whole series of thicknesses that you can use in your design hint: change / 2 to / 2 + 2*N

We can generalize condition for a QWP by adding integral 2 to the phase difference: 1 2 4 s f = d ( ns n f ) = + 2 d = o 2 ( ns n f )

0 + N

where N is 0,1,2,"