Electro-Optical Method for polarimetric measurement

When passing a pulsing beam of polarized light of an LED or a semiconductor laser thru an optical system and two photodiodes spatially arranged at 900 to each other and both with their detection faces parallel to the transmission shaft of light, and polarization axis oriented at 450 of the vertices of the edges where the photodiodes join, in the outputs of two operational amplifiers, we have two signals with the same shape in time, i.e. a pulse train with the same phase, but when you turn the polarization plane, change the radiance of the light projected onto the photodiodes, being out of phase signals to the outputs of the amplifiers, where the difference between the fronts of the pulses is proportional to the angle of rotation of the plane of polarization of light. In a digital circuit phase discriminator, a pulse is obtained equal to the time difference between two sides of the rise in the output of two amplifiers. The width of this is directly proportional to the value of rotation the plane of polarization of light, that is, the greater the rotation, the greater the width of this pulse. (Author)