Electrically rotated retarder/diattenuator system for application to a variety of polarization elements

This study presents an optical system equivalent to a polarization element, which can be applied as a linear phase retarder with arbitrary phase retardation or a linear diattenuator with arbitrary diattenuation. The principal axis of the equivalent polarization element can be rotated by applying an electrical signal to an electro-optic modulator. The simple optical system setup is only composed of three polarization elements in a round-trip configuration. The proposed system is versatile, in that it can be applied to a variety of polarization elements that have linear anisotropy.