title: Polarization microscopy by use of digital holography: application to optical-fiber birefringence measurements.
abstract: We present a digital holographic microscope that permits one to image polarization state. This technique results from the coupling of digital holographic microscopy and polarization digital holography. The interference between two orthogonally polarized reference waves and the wave transmitted by a microscopic sample, magnified by a microscope objective, is recorded on a CCD camera. The off-axis geometry permits one to reconstruct separately from this single hologram two wavefronts that are used to image the object-wave Jones vector. We applied this technique to image the birefringence of a bent fiber. To evaluate the precision of the phase-difference measurement, the birefringence induced by internal stress in an optical fiber is measured and compared to the birefringence profile captured by a standard method, which had been developed to obtain high-resolution birefringence profiles of optical fibers.
authors.affiliation: Imaging and Applied Optics Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. tristan.colomb@epfl.ch
authors.forename: Tristan
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Colomb
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Dürr
authors.forename: Etienne
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Cuche
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Marquet
authors.forename: Hans G
authors.initials: HG
authors.lastname: Limberger
authors.forename: René-Paul
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Salathé
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Depeursinge
mesh_terms: D001718:Birefringence; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D005336:Fiber Optic Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000295:instrumentation*; D008859:Microscopy, Polarization / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D055100:Optical Fibers; D012031:Refractometry / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*