Fresnel rhomb

A Fresnel rhomb is an optical prism that introduces a 90° phase difference between two perpendicular components of polarization, by means of two total internal reflections. If the incident beam is linearly polarized at 45° to the plane of incidence and reflection, the emerging beam is circularly polarized, and vice versa. If the incident beam is linearly polarized at some other inclination, the emerging beam is elliptically polarized with one principal axis in the plane of reflection, and vice versa.

The rhomb usually takes the form of a right parallelepiped, or in other words, a solid with six parallelogram faces (a square is to a cube as a parallelogram is to a parallelepiped). If the incident ray is perpendicular to one of the smaller rectangular faces, the angle of incidence and reflection at both of the longer faces is equal to the acute angle of the parallelogram. This angle is chosen so that each reflection introduces a phase difference of 45° between the components polarized parallel and perpendicular to the plane of reflection. For a given, sufficiently high refractive index, there are two angles meeting this criterion; for example, an index of 1.5 requires an angle of 50.2° or 53.3°.

Conversely, if the angle of incidence and reflection is fixed, the phase difference introduced by the rhomb depends only on its refractive index, which typically varies only slightly over the visible spectrum. Thus the rhomb functions as if it were a wideband quarter-wave plate – in contrast to a conventional birefringent (doubly-refractive) quarter-wave plate, whose phase difference is more sensitive to the frequency (color) of the light. The material of which the rhomb is made – usually glass – is specifically not birefringent.

The Fresnel rhomb is named after its inventor, the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, who developed the device in stages between 1817 and 1823. During that time he deployed it in crucial experiments involving polarization, birefringence, and optical rotation, all of which contributed to the eventual acceptance of his transverse-wave theory of light.

Incident electromagnetic waves (such as light) consist of transverse vibrations in the electric and magnetic fields; these are proportional to and at right angles to each other and may therefore be represented by (say) the electric field alone. When striking an interface, the electric field oscillations can be resolved into two perpendicular components, known as the s and p components, which are parallel to the surface and the plane of incidence, respectively; in other words, the s and p components are respectively square and parallel to the plane of incidence.

Light passing through a Fresnel rhomb undergoes two total internal reflections at the same carefully chosen angle of incidence. After one such reflection, the p component is advanced by 1/8 of a cycle (45°; π/4 radians) relative to the s component. With two such reflections, a relative phase shift of 1/4 of a cycle (90°; π/2) is obtained. The word relative is critical: as the wavelength is very small compared with the dimensions of typical apparatus, the individual phase advances suffered by the s and p components are not readily observable, but the difference between them is easily observable through its effect on the state of polarization of the emerging light.

If the incoming light is linearly polarized (plane-polarized), the s and p components are initially in phase; hence, after two reflections, "the p component is 90° ahead in phase", so that the polarization of the emerging light is elliptical with principal axes in the s and p directions (Fig. 1). Similarly, if the incoming light is elliptically polarized with axes in the s and p directions, the emerging light is linearly polarized.

In the special case in which the incoming s and p components not only are in phase but also have equal magnitudes, the initial linear polarization is at 45° to the plane of incidence and reflection, and the final elliptical polarization is circular. If the circularly polarized light is inspected through an analyzer (second polarizer), it seems to have been completely "depolarized", because its observed brightness is independent of the orientation of the analyzer. But if this light is processed by a second rhomb, it is repolarized at 45° to the plane of reflection in that rhomb – a property not shared by ordinary (unpolarized) light.