Wavefront phase calculation of optical vector beams using phase shifting interferometry

P García-Martínez¹, I Moreno^2,3 and M M Sánchez-López^2,4
1Department of Optics and Optometry and Vision Science, Faculty of Physics,
University of Valencia, 46100 Burjassot (Valencia), Spain
²Bioengineering Institute, Miguel Hernández University, 03202 Elche, Spain
³Department of Materials Science, Optics and Electronics Technology,
Miguel Hernández University, 03202 Elche, Spain
⁴Department of Applied Physics, Miguel Hernández University, 03202 Elche, Spain

Dedicated to Prof Maria J Yzuel

Recently, we proposed and built an optical system to generate arbitrary vector beams (VB) using two liquid-crystal on silicon (LCoS) spatial light modulators (SLM). Since the LCoS-SLMs devices used in the system are flicker-free, we showed the generation of VBs on-axis in a common path architecture being very efficient in terms of light energy. Here, we further demonstrate that the same system is also useful to perform common-path phase-shifting interferometry, thus being a useful tool to evaluate the phase distribution of the generated optical VB. We show different VBs obtained by superposition of two Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams with different orthogonal polarizations. The phase measurement is obtained by phase shifting interferometry (PSI), obtained by adding different values of a uniform phase distribution in one of the SLMs, and registering the corresponding interferograms. The continuous phase modulation provided by the LCoS-SLMs is demonstrated here to be useful to apply the synchronous detection interferometric technique for the verification of the phase distribution of different VBs. © Anita Publications. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Vector modes, Laguerre-Gaussian Beams, Vector beams, Interferometry, LCoS, Phase Shifting.

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