Polarization measurement with space-variant retarders in liquid crystal polymers

We present a real-time polarization measurement method with a space-variant phase retarder in liquid crystal polymers. This retarder presents a continuous and periodical variation of its optical axis orientation. The method computes the Stokes parameters of an incident beam by studying the intensity distribution after the retarder and a linear polarizer. This paper contains the mathematical modelization, the numerical simulation, the description of the experimental setup, the results for several completely polarized beams and the future developments of this method.