Phase measurement of a spatially varying polarization distribution

For many optical measurement applications, a polarization matching is necessary. Therefore, appropriate polarization manipulating elements are inserted into the measurement setup. However, those optical elements result not only in the desired polarization distribution, but also introduce an additional phase term. Usually, this phase term can be neglected, as it is constant in space and time for a homogeneous polarization distribution. As the interest in non-homogeneous polarization modes is increasing, spatially varying polarization manipulating elements are needed. These optical elements introduce a spatially varying phase which can not be neglected any more. In this contribution, an interferometric setup is presented for measuring the additional relative phase of artificial wave plates and polarizers with spatially varying orientations of the optic axes. Contrary to most interferometric setups which show a certain dependence of the measurement results on the polarization distribution, this setup is designed to cope with any polarization distribution.