Abstract

A polarization device can be described by the Jones polarization matrix. The difference between a magnetooptic (MO) (nonreciprocal) medium and a dielectric birefringent (reciprocal) medium must be taken into account in cases involving round-trip wave propagation through a medium. One possible way is to consider each component of the wave vector to study the net effect of round-trip propagation through a medium. This is not convenient when many polarization devices are involved, such as in a MO system. We show that the net effect of round-trip propagation can easily be obtained by using the matrices describing the forward and backward propagation through the same medium. If the Jones matrix for forward propagation is T, the matrix for backward propagation is the transpose of T. Here T is symmetric for reciprocal media and nonsymmetric for MO media.

© 1991 Optical Society of America