title: Calibration method for a photoelastic modulator with a peak retardation of less than a half-wavelength.
abstract: A new calibration method for a photoelastic modulator is proposed. The calibration includes a coarse calibration and a fine calibration. In the coarse calibration, the peak retardation of the photoelastic modulator is set near 1.841 rad. In the fine calibration, the value of the zeroth Bessel function is obtained. The zeroth Bessel function is approximated as a linear equation to directly calculate the peak retardation. In experiments, the usefulness of the calibration method is verified and the calibration error is less than 0.014 rad. The calibration is immune to the intensity fluctuation of the light source and independent of the circuit parameters. The method specially suits the calibration of a photoelastic modulator with a peak retardation of less than a half-wavelength.
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. aijunzeng@siom.ac.cn
authors.forename: Aijun
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zeng
authors.forename: Lihua
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Zuoren
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Jianming
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Huijie
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Xiangzhao
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang