Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Axially symmetric polarized beams have attracted great interest recently in the field of optics. There have been several viable proposals concerning axially symmetric polarizers, also referred to as radial polarizers. In contrast, proposals for axially symmetric wave plates have strong dependence on wavelength. Moreover, the structure of the axially symmetric wave plates inherently introduces spatial dispersion. As a solution to these problems, we propose an achromatic axially symmetric wave plate based on internal Fresnel reflection that does not introduce spatial dispersion. It is possible to generate the achromatic axially symmetric polarized beam. In this paper, we show the principle of the achromatic axially symmetric wave plate and the evaluation results of the optical element using a Mueller matrix polarimeter. © 2013 SPIE