| 摘要 |
An optical depolarizer and method of depolarizing light is described. An input light beam is split into two beams. One split beam is recirculated through a birefringent medium and looped back to be recombined with the input light. This allows a weighted averaging of the different polarization states that result from birefringence in the recirculation path of the recirculated beam. The depolarizer is formed from single mode fiber optic cables and fused single mode fiber couplers. Each fiber coupler has an input pair of fibers and an output pair of fibers. One of the output fibers is coupled to one of the input fibers to form a recirculation loop. Additionally, polarization controllers provided in the input fiber and recirculation loop allow the degree of polarization of the output beam to be varied across a wide spectrum of values.
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