Miguel A. Alonso
Aix Marseille Univ., Centrale Marseille, Institut Fresnel, France
The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, USA
” The Poincaré sphere, its generalizations, and their several applications in optics “
In this talk I discuss the concept of the Poincaré sphere and its applications in optics, not only for describing paraxial polarization but also the spatial structure of optical beams, both within the ray and wave models. Also discussed are generalizations of the Poincaré sphere for the case of non-paraxial polarization (where all three field components are important), and their application in a novel technique for fluorescent microscopy.
