Tunable optical differential operation based on the cross-polarization effect at the optical interface

Abstract

To achieve optical differential operation based on the cross-polarization effect at the optical interface, one just needs an optical interface composed of two uniform media with different refractive indices. When certain conditions are satisfied, the reflection co-efficient of the light field at the interface conforms to the form of the spatial spectrum transfer function required by the spatial differentiation, the spatial analog operation can be achieved with a single interface. In this paper, based on the optical differentiation of Brewster effect, we propose a tunable optical differentiation based on the cross-polarization effect at the optical interface. We theoretically derive the tunable optical differentiation and then conduct an experiment to demonstrate theoretical results. It is found that the differentiator can achieve the tunable optical differentiation by adjusting the polarization of output beam. While getting the clear edge of the object, we can also observe the imaging of the middle part to different degrees, which realizes the multi-degree of freedom imaging for the measured target. This provides a potential way to develop devices more suitable for microscopic imaging and target detection.