Retrieval of a non-depolarizing component of experimentally determined depolarizing Mueller matrices

The measurement of the Mueller matrix when the probing beam is placed on the boundary between two (or more) regions of the sample with different optical properties may lead to a depolarization in the Mueller matrix. The depolarization is due to the incoherent superposition of the optical responses of different sample regions in the probe beam. Despite of the depolarization, the measured Mueller matrix has information enough to subtract a Mueller matrix corresponding to one of the regions of sample provided that this subtracted matrix is non-depolarizing. For clarity, we will call these non-depolarizing Mueller matrices of one individual region of the sample simply as the non-depolarizing components. In the framework of the theory of Mueller matrix algebra, we have implemented a procedure allowing the retrieval of a non-depolarizing component from a depolarizing Mueller matrix constituted by the sum of several non-depolarizing components. In order to apply the procedure, the Mueller matrices of the rest of the non-depolarizing components have to be known. Here we present a numerical and algebraic approaches to implement the subtraction method. To illustrate our method as well as the performance of the two approaches, we present two practical examples. In both cases we have measured depolarizing Mueller matrices by positioning an illumination beam on the boundary between two and three different regions of a sample, respectively. The goal was to retrieve the non-depolarizing Mueller matrix of one of those regions from the measured depolarizing Mueller matrix. In order to evaluate the performance of the method we compared the subtracted matrix with the Mueller matrix of the selected region measured separately. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America