Depolarization has been found to be a useful contrast mechanism in biological and medical imaging. The Mueller matrix can be used to describe polarization effects of a depolarizing material. An historical review of relevant polarization algebra, meas...
The determinant of a Mueller matrix M plays an important role in both polarization algebra and the interpretation of polarimetric measurements. While certain physical quantities encoded in M admit a direct interpretation, the understanding of the phy...
The review contains a systematization of the main approaches to the practical implementation of Mueller matrix polarimetry and the prospects for its application in biology and agriculture. The most typical optical layouts for measuring the Mueller ma...
Recently, Mueller matrix polarimetry (MMP) has been widely applied in many aspects, such as radar target decomposition, monitoring the glucose level, tissue diagnostics, biological samples, etc., but it is still challenging for the complex light&ndas...
Currently, there are various calibration methods available to reduce the errors caused by the polarizing section of a dual-rotating-retarder polarimeter. Although these methods have high measurement accuracy, their robustness must be improved and the...
This paper focuses on the coupling relationships between the optical constants (n: refractive index; k: extinction coefficient) and Mueller matrix elements, as well as between the morphological parameters (σ: root mean square roughness; τ:...
At a particular frequency, most materials and objects of interest exhibit a polarization signature, or Mueller matrix, of limited dimensionality, with many matrix elements either negligibly small or redundant due to symmetry. Robust design of a polar...
Many books on polarization give tables of Mueller matrices. The coherency matrix has been found useful for interpretetion of the Mueller matrix. Here we give a table of Mueller matrices M, coherency matrices C, and coherency matrix factors F for diff...
Mueller matrix polarimetry is a potentially powerful technique for obtaining microstructural information of biomedical specimens. Thus, it has found increasing application in both backscattering imaging of bulk tissue samples and transmission microsc...
The development of necessary instrumentation and metrology at the nanoscale, especially fast, low-cost, and nondestructive metrology techniques, is of great significance for the realization of reliable and repeatable nanomanufacturing. In this work,...
Safety of the observation window is one of the core concerns for manned submersibles. When subjected to underwater static pressure, extrusion and creep deformation always occur in the observation window, which can pose a threat to both safety and opt...
The Jones matrix and the Mueller matrix of the coherent Rayleigh backscattering (RB) in single-mode fibers (SMFs) have been derived recently. It has been shown that both matrices depict two polarization effects—birefringence and polarization-de...
Tongue cancer, the most aggressive subtype of oral cancer, presents critical challenges due to the limited number of specialists available and the time-consuming nature of conventional histopathological diagnosis. To address these issues, we develope...
Polarization imaging and sensing techniques have shown great potential for biomedical and clinical applications. As a novel optical biosensing technology, Mueller matrix polarimetry can provide abundant microstructural information of tissue samples....
Cyanine dyes are known to form H- and J-aggregates in aqueous solutions. Here we show that the cyanine dye, S0271, assembles in water into vortex induced chiral J-aggregates. The chirality of the J-aggregates depends on the directionality of the vort...
Mueller matrix polarimetry has great potential for tissue detection and clinical diagnosis due to its ability to provide rich microstructural information accurately. However, in practical in vivo tissue imaging based on backscattering Mueller matrix...
A 3 × 3 Mueller matrix polarimeter, as one of the primary polarization measurement tools, has attracted intensive interest in various fields of polarization optics. In this paper, from a novel viewpoint with more mathematical analysis of the ba...
Evaluation of the mechanical properties of biological tissues has always been an important issue in the field of biomedicine. The traditional method for mechanical properties measurement is to perform in vitro tissue deformation experiments. With the...
In order to meet the requirements of dynamic monitoring from a bird’s eye view for typical rapidly changing processes such as mechanical rotation and photoresist exposure reaction, we propose a vertical high-speed Mueller matrix ellipsometer th...
Nanoscale defects on the surface of ultra-precision optical elements seriously affect the beam quality in optical systems. In response to the challenge of detecting nanoscale defects on optical component surfaces, we propose a method for the detectio...
Corneal collagen cross-linking is an established procedure for the treatment of certain eye diseases which is applied to enhance the mechanical stability of such biotissue without deteriorating its functionality. However, being transparent, the optic...
29 September 2025
This study investigates the magneto-optical properties of a ferrofluid using an accessible Ferrocell device. Our findings demonstrate that the ferrofluid’s behavior is critically dependent on its concentration. At high concentrations, the mediu...
Mueller matrix polarimetry is widely used in biomedical studies and applications, for it can provide abundant microstructural information about tissues. Recently, several methods have been proposed to decompose the Mueller matrix into groups of param...
The decomposition of the Mueller matrix of blood films has been carried out using differential matrices with polarized and depolarized parts. The use of a coherent reference wave is applied and the algorithm of digital holographic reconstruction of t...
Silk fibers suffer from microstructural changes due to various external environmental conditions including daily washings. In this paper, we take the backscattering Mueller matrix images of silk samples for non-destructive and real-time quantitative...
The separation of the combined effects of absorption and scattering in complex media is a major issue for better characterization and prediction of media properties. In this study, an approach coupling polarized light spectroscopy and the Mueller mat...
Optical scanning microscopy techniques based on the polarization control of the light have the capability of providing non invasive label-free contrast. By comparing the polarization states of the excitation light with its transformation after intera...
Mueller matrix polarimetry is recently attracting more and more attention for its diagnostic potentials. However, for prevalently used division of time Mueller matrix polarimeter based on dual-rotating retarder scheme, beam drift induced by rotating...
Mueller matrix ellipsometry (MME) is a powerful metrology tool for nanomanufacturing. The application of MME necessitates electromagnetic computations for inverse problems of metrology determination in both the conventional optimization process and t...
This paper proposes a full-automatic high-efficiency Mueller matrix microscopic imaging (MMMI) system based on the tissue microarray (TMA) for cancer inspection for the first time. By performing a polar decomposition on the sample’s Mueller mat...
The complete Stokes vector contains much more information than the radiance of light for the remote sensing of the ocean. Unlike the conventional radiance-only radiative transfer simulations, a full Mueller matrix-Stokes vector treatment provides a r...
Electrospun fiber scaffolds are gaining in importance in the area of tissue engineering. They can be used, for example, to fabricate graded implants to mimic the tendon bone junction. For the grading of the tensile strength of the fiber scaffolds, th...
This paper highlights the application of decomposition methods in Mueller polarimetry for the discrimination of three groups of barley leaf samples from Hordeum vulgare: Chlorina mutant, Chlorina etiolated mutant and Cesaer varieties in the visible w...
Due to the limited accuracy of experimental data, Mueller polarimetry can produce real 4×4 matrices that fail to meet required covariance or passivity conditions. A general and simple procedure to convert any real 4×4 matrix into a valid...
Malignant melanoma is considered the most serious type of skin cancer. In clinical practice, the conventional technique based on subjective visual examination has a high rate of misdiagnosis for malignant melanoma and benign nevus. Polarization imagi...
Electrospun polycaprolactone:gelatin (PCL:GT) fibre scaffolds are widely employed in the field of tissue implants. Here, the orientation of fibres plays an important role in regard to implantation due to the impact on the mechanical properties. Likew...
The transformation of the states of polarization of electromagnetic waves through their interaction with polarimetrically linear media can be represented by the associated Mueller matrices. A global measure of the ability of a linear medium to modify...
The centrifugal liquid membrane (CLM) cell has been utilized for chiroptical studies of liquid-liquid interfaces with a conventional circular dichroism (CD) spectropolarimeter. These studies required the characterization of optical properties of the...
Polarization imaging is a label-free and non-invasive technique that is sensitive to microstructure and suitable for probing the microstructure of living tissues. However, obtaining deep-layer information from tissues has been a challenge for optical...
Leveraging their unique phase modulation characteristics, birefringent waveplates have been widely used in various optical systems. With the development of material science and manufacturing techniques, the polarization properties of waveplates have...
A wide class of nonuniformly totally polarized beams that preserve their transverse polarization pattern during paraxial propagation was studied. Beams of this type are of interest, in particular, in polarimetric techniques that use a single input be...
In this work, we performed a Mueller matrix imaging analysis of two commercial optical components usually employed to generate and manipulate vector beams—a radial polarizer and a liquid-crystal q-plate. These two elements generate vector beams by di...
Scars usually do not show strong contrast under standard skin examination relying on dermoscopes. They usually develop after skin injury when the body repairs the damaged tissue. In general, scars cause multiple types of distress such as movement res...
With the widespread application of optical technology in numerous fields, the polarization performance of transmissive optical components has become increasingly crucial. The extinction ratio, an important indicator for evaluating their polarization...
Volume grating is a key optical component due to its comprehensive applications. Other than the common grating structures, volume grating is essentially a predesigned refractive index distribution recorded in materials, which raises the challenges of...
Polarization imaging can quantitatively probe the microscopic structure of biological tissues which can be complex and consist of layered structures. In this paper, we established a fast-backscattering Mueller matrix imaging system to characterize th...
The light polarization properties provide relevant information about linear–optical media quality and condition. The Stokes–Mueller formalism is commonly used to represent the polarization properties of the incident light over sample test...
Optical chirality, in terms of circular birefringence and circular dichroism, is described by its electromagnetic and magnetoelectric material tensors, and the corresponding optical activity contributes to the Mueller matrix. Here, spectroscopic elli...
Transparent films of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) are prepared by dip-coating on glass substrates from aqueous suspensions of hydrolyzed filter paper. Dragging forces acting during films’ deposition promote a preferential alignment of the rod-s...
We studied the polarization of light in a thin film of ferrofluid subjected to a magnetic field using the Mueller matrix formalism. By observing the results of some experiments, we relate the observed light patterns with Stokes vectors that can be op...
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