Yuzhao MA^* and Renbiao WU

Tianjin Key Laboratory for Advanced Signal Processing, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin 300300, P. R. China

(Received August 16, 2013; Revised October 29, 2013; Accepted October 30, 2013)

In the present work two methods of characterizing polarization properties of well-known radially polarized beams are discussed in both theoretical aspect and experimental aspect. A rotating linear polarizer used behind the beam is known to be used to qualitatively characterize the polarization properties of a radially polarized beam. In this paper for the first time we give the mathematic model of this characterization process. The proposed model helps to analyze the known experimental results. On the other hand two global parameters have been previously proved to be used to characterize the linear or circular polarization content of the radially polarized beams. In this paper for the first time we propose the theoretical model of determining the two parameters in experiments. Some experimental results on characterizing the polarization properties of the real radially polarized beam produced by using different approaches are shown.

Key words: radially polarized beams, Stokes parameters, linear polarizer

^*E-mail address: yzma@cauc.edu.cn