Innovative integrated numerical-experimental method for high-performance multispectral Mueller polarimeters based on ferroelectric liquid crystals

In this work, an original and effective integrated numerical-experimental approach is proposed for building a high-performance multispectral Mueller polarimeter based on ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs). This method relies on accurate experimental characterization of the optical components specifically selected to construct such a system, combined with a numerical procedure used to optimize it, in the spectral range of interest, by means of a global optimization function. The proposed strategy enabled the construction of an FLC-based Mueller polarimeter in transmission configuration operating between 450 and 700 nm. The robustness of this system to various optical component misalignments, as well as the conditions to keep the measurement error less than 1% over the whole spectral range of interest, have been determined experimentally. The proposed strategy is very well suited to build optimized multispectral Mueller polarimetric systems for biomedical applications for which variations of the order of a few percent in the elements of the measured Mueller matrices need to be appreciated.