Abstract

Polarization phenomena had been fully described in many optics text books for many decades, or even centuries. However, most elementary or medium level optics books ignore some important facts about polarization. In this presentation we describe some of the little known facts. For example, that un-polarized He-Ne lasers cannot exist and second, that coherence requirements for high contrast fringes in interference phenomena have similar requirements in polarization. On the other hand, the fact that a perfectly monochromatic light beam is always perfectly polarized but a perfectly polarized beam does not have to be perfectly monochromatic, has some interesting consequences that will be here described.

© 2014 Optical Society of America