Enhancing polarisation imaging through novel polarimetry and adaptive optics

. Precise polarisation imaging requires two key aspects – imaging resolution and vector information correctness. Errors in the state of polarisation (SOP) can disrupt these two aspects hence leading to imperfect interference at the focus, and incorrect vector states in the illumination or detection. Those issues will therefore lead to detrimental problems for high resolution polarisation sensitive optical systems, such as Stokes/Mueller confocal microscopes. The SOP errors can be introduced in different ways, which include pre-measurement processes, such as denoising, optimisation, and calibration, which are built on matrix calculation processes which would introduce an error amplification; or, other errors sources in optical systems such as focusing through stressed optical elements, due to Fresnel’s effects, or induced via polarising effects in materials or biological tissues Here we put forward two techniques to deal with those errors, including next generation polarimetry and next generation adaptive optics techniques. We first show a new polarimetry method that has the ability to map all polarisation analyser states into a single vectorially structured light field, hence all vector components are analysed in a single-shot. We extract the vectorial state through inference from a physical model of the resulting image, providing a single-step sensing procedure. These methods in effect circumvent these method-related error amplification, accumulation and complex preprocessing steps. We then show a new adaptive optics technology that can correct both phase and polarisation aberrations within the optical systems. We validate improvements in both vector field state and the focal quality of an optical system, through correction for commonplace vectorial aberration sources.