598 research outputs found
Optical Activities as Computing Resources for Space-time Symmetries
It is known that optical activities can perform rotations. It is shown that
the rotation, if modulated by attenuations, can perform symmetry operations of
Wigner's little group which dictates the internal space-time symmetries of
elementary particles.Comment: 13 pages, to be published in J. Mod. Optic
Determination of the characteristic directions of lossless linear optical elements
We show that the problem of finding the primary and secondary characteristic
directions of a linear lossless optical element can be reformulated in terms of
an eigenvalue problem related to the unimodular factor of the transfer matrix
of the optical device. This formulation makes any actual computation of the
characteristic directions amenable to pre-implemented numerical routines,
thereby facilitating the decomposition of the transfer matrix into equivalent
linear retarders and rotators according to the related Poincare equivalence
theorem. The method is expected to be useful whenever the inverse problem of
reconstruction of the internal state of a transparent medium from optical data
obtained by tomographical methods is an issue.Comment: Replaced with extended version as published in JM
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