Full Poincaré polarimetry enabled through physical inference

Abstract

While polarization sensing is vital in many areas of research, with applications spanning from microscopy to aerospace, traditional approaches are limited by method-related error amplification, accumulation, and pre-processing steps, constraining the performance of single-shot polarimetry. Here, we propose a measurement paradigm that circumvents these limitations, based on the use of a universal full Poincaré generator to map all polarization analyzer states into a single vectorially structured light field. All vector components are analyzed in a single shot, extracting the vectorial state through inference from a physical model of the resulting image, providing a single-step sensing procedure. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we use a common graded index (GRIN) optic as our mapping device and show mean errors of < 1 % for each vector component. Our work paves the way for next-generation polarimetry, impacting a wide variety of applications that rely on vector measurement.