Polarization characteristics of a wire-grid polarizer in a rotating platform

I explore the polarization characteristics of a wire-grid polarizer operating in a rotating platform using well-established rigorous coupled-wave analysis. The results show that the performance of a wire-grid polarizer evaluated in transmittance and extinction ratio is substantially degraded with rotation, although it is still more robust than that of a perfect polarizer. The performance may further deteriorate with inclined incidence due to an increased negative effect of a Rayleigh anomaly. Either a finer or a deeper grating reduces the adverse effect of rotation. Although implementation of such a grating is difficult, the rotation characteristics can be enhanced by means of pixelating the wire grids of various orientations and capturing the input images with a sufficiently high sampling rate. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.