This work was partially financed by DGI-PUCP (Grant No. 2015-224). J.C. received financial support from CONCYTEC/FONDECYT (Peru).

We present a simple device that works as a secondary source of light with prescribed polarization properties. The device has great versatility, allowing complete control over both the degree of polarization and the Stokes vector that belongs to the fully polarized component of partially polarized light beams. We report experimental results that illustrate the device’s versatility, by showing how polarized states can be moved within the Poincaré ball along spiraling paths.

CONCYTEC-FONDECYT (Grant-No. 233-2015-2); DGI-PUCP (Grant-No. 441).

Quantum objects, sometimes called quantons, often display a characteristic feature that is referred to as wave-particle duality (WPD). Lately, this and other quantum traits have been submitted to intensive research, mainly motivated by the development of quantum information science. As a consequence, the scope of some concepts have been extended and it has been realized that they are not in the exclusive domain of quantum physics. This is particularly clear in optics, where qubits may show up as Jones vectors and WPD has its counterpart as wave-ray duality. WPD was originally addressed by focussing on a single qubit, which was afterwards supplemented with a second one playing the role of a path-marker in an interferometric setup. Fringe contrast, a sign of wavelike behavior, was proved to be diminished in connection with the e ectiveness of the marker, the inducer of particle-like behavi...

We report robust polarimetric measurements of mixed-state geometric phases. An all-optical setup was used to generate geometric phases with great versatility, thereby extending the scope of analogous methods used in neutron polarimetry. Our method allows us to explore geometric phases generated by unitarily evolving mixed states. These are realized as partially polarized single-photon states whose degree of polarization and normalized Stokes vector can be fixed independently of one another. The geometric phases correspond to both open and closed trajectories in Poincaré space. By exploiting the gauge invariance of geometric phases we nullify their dynamical part, thereby making the geometric phase coincide with the total (Pancharatnam) phase, which can be directly addressed by employing standard techniques.

CONCYTEC-FONDECYT (Grant-Nr. 233-2015); CONCYTEC-FONDECYT (Grant-Nr. 236-2015); DGI-PUCP (Grant-Nr. 441).

This research was funded by the Research Management Office (DGI) of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). The authors have been supported by the PUCP under the PhD scholarship program Huiracocha (J.A. Guerra), the “Programa de repatriación” (J.A. Töfflinger), the Master scholarship (L.M. Montañez and K. Tucto) from CONCYTEC and the “Círculo de investigación” from CONCYTEC. The authors would like to thank Prof. Dr. A. R. Zanatta (IFSC-USP, Brazil) for providing access to his lab in order to perform the PL measurements and Prof. Dr. H. P. Strunk (University of Stuttgart, Germany) for helping us with the PLE measurements.

In this work, we propose a method to retrieve the thickness and optical constants of dielectric thin films from single optical transmittance measurements. The method is based on the envelope method and requires a simple dispersion model for the real part of the refractive index with few fitting parameters, while the absorption coefficient can be determined without the aid of a dispersion model. The wavelength-dependent optical constants can be obtained even from spectra that exhibit few interference fringes. We have tested the method with simulated and real transmittance data from thin films in the spectral range covering the fundamental absorption. In order to assess the method’s reliability to retrieve the optical constants and optical bandgap, a comparison is performed with the method by Chambouleyron, known as the Pointwise Unconstrained Minimization Approach, and a fit using the C...