Highly efficient broadband polarization retarders and tunable polarization filters made of composite stacks of ordinary wave plates

Abstract: By using the formal analogy between the evolution of the state vector in quantum mechanics and the Jones vector in polarization optics, we construct and demonstrate experimentally efficient broadband half-wave polarization retarders and tunable narrowband polarization filters. Both the broadband retarders and the filters are constructed by the same set of stacked standard multi-order optical wave plates rotated at different angles with respect to their fast polarization axes: for a certain set of angles this device behaves as a broadband polarization retarder while for another set of angles it turns into a narrowband polarization filter. We demonstrate that the transmission profile of our filter can be centered around any desired wavelength in a certain vicinity of the design wavelength of the wave plates solely by selecting appropriate rotation angles.