Achromatic half-wave combination of birefringent plates

Half-wave retarders are primarily used in rotating the plane of polarization of polarized light. These retarders usually exhibit strong wavelength dependence. In this paper, the design and characteristics of an achromatic half-wave plate, formed by a cascaded system of birefringent plates, have been studied. Pancharatnam proposed a combination of three retarders in series and discussed the possibility of fabricating reasonably good achromatic quarter-wave plate with a suitable combination of their retardance. The system studied here is similar in construction to Pancharatnam configuration and behaves as an achromatic half-wave plate over a wide spectral range. The proposed configuration exhibits a maximum variation of only about ±1.4 degree over the entire wavelength range of 500–750 nm. In our analysis we have used Jones matrix formalism for the derivation of the general expression for the equivalent retardation and the azimuth of the combination.