Unpolarized Beamsplitter Cubes

Unpolarized beamsplitters are useful for natural, incoherent or unpolarized light. It is advised not to use these cubes in polarized optical systems.

The unpolarized beamsplitter cubes consist of a pair of precision right-angle prisms carefully cemented together to minimize wavefront distortion and beam skewing. The hypotenuse of one prism is coated with a multilayer beamsplitter coating tuned to the application. The four outside surfaces of the prism are anti-reflection (AR) coated with”V” type or broadband coatings to minimize surface reflection losses over the specific wavelength range.

For proper functioning, the incoming light should be one of the following:

– natural light

– circularly polarized

– 45° linearly polarized

This means that the s-polarized and p-polarized components should be roughly equal to each other in intensity. The outgoing beams are two partially polarized beams of approximately equal intensities.

*: T=(Ts+Tp)/2, R=(Rs+Rp)/2