Youichi BITOU^*

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), AIST Tsukuba Central 3, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8563, Japan

(Received April 25, 2002; Accepted June 28, 2002)

A simple method to reduce the polarization mixing in a two-beam interferometer is proposed. A small separation angle Wollaston prism and an optical wedge were added to the conventional heterodyne setup. It was experimentally demonstrated that the polarization mixing error was reduced below 52.4 mrad by this method.

Key words: interferometer, polarization mixing error, high extinction ratio, nonlinearity