Method for simultaneously calibrating peak retardation and static retardation of a photoelastic modulator

A method for simultaneously calibrating the peak retardation and static retardation of a photoelastic modulator (PEM) is proposed. By optimizing the polarization modulation system, the normalized fundamental frequency components of the modulation signals are obtained to calculate the peak retardation and static retardation of the PEM. The calibration result is immune to fluctuations of the incident light intensity and can be used to correct the deviation of the photoelastic modulation detection results. In our experiments, the average deviation between measured peak retardations and corresponding set values is 0.0339 rad. The standard deviation between the measured static retardations and the average measured value is 0.0003 rad. The calibration method has a high sensitivity, since the large gradient of the first-order Bessel function when the peak retardation is less than 1 rad. The experimental results are consistent with the theoretical analysis.