One-shot carrier fringe polarimeter in a double-aperture common-path interferometer

This paper presents a novel, simple, robust, and very stable polarimeter which is able to measure in a single-shot the state of polarization (SOP) of an optical field. In this proposal, an optical field with an unknown SOP and an optical field with a reference SOP are superposed by using a double aperture common-path interferometer (DACPI), obtaining two interferograms with adjustable carrier frequency in a single shot. Each interferogram has different visibility and phase-step where the information of the unknown SOP is contained. It is shown that under a typical Fourier analysis any SOP can be successfully measured without the necessity of knowing the carrier frequency. The present proposal is justified mathematically and probed experimentally.