Determining the retardation of a wave plate by using spectroscopic method

A method for determining the retardation of a wave plate is presented. The method is based on polychromatic polarization interference technique. Through accurate judgment of the intersection points' wavelengths of the two orthogonal polarization transmittance spectrum curves, the apparent retardation, the absolute retardation values and the physical thickness of a wave plate can be measured at a wide spectral range from 400 nm to 800 nm. Experimental results show that the proposed method has very high precision. In addition, the method has a significant advantage that has high misalignment tolerance. The method reported here should have applications in fabrication and measurement of a wave plate.