Abstract
Recent developments of polarized light sources with tunable state and degree of polarization (SOP and DOP) inherently provide a temporally incoherent beam, which makes them unsuitable for applications like interferometry. We present a method for generating a coherent beam with full, precise, and independent control of the SOP and DOP. Our approach is based on an imbalanced dual-frequency dual-polarization light source. We demonstrate that it offers three different working regimes, respectively providing perfectly depolarized light, DOP modulated light, or fully polarized light with a deterministic SOP trajectory. A simple implementation of this versatile approach is described and experimentally validated.
© 2017 Optical Society of America
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