Design of a wedge plate for polarization-preserving angular shifter

Abstract

It is shown that by using a wedge plate, the incident direction of light propagation can be rotated as necessary while still preserving beam polarization. The basic conditions of these preservations of polarization are deduced. For numerical demonstration, it is shown that a collimated beam with +45A degrees linear polarization can be guided to any pre-settled direction where the square of ellipse ratio variation in the polarization is less than 0.0001%, while the variation of squared ellipse ratio of a right circular polarization beam is kept under 0.1%.