Generation of a coherent light beam with precise and fast dynamic control of the state and degree of polarization.

Recent developments of polarized light sources with tunable state and degree of polarization (SOP and DOP) inherently provide a temporally incoherent beam, which makes them unsuitable for applications like interferometry. We present a method for generating a coherent beam with full, precise, and independent control of the SOP and DOP. Our approach is based on an imbalanced dual-frequency dual-polarization light source. We demonstrate that it offers three different working regimes, respectively providing perfectly depolarized light, DOP modulated light, or fully polarized light with a deterministic SOP trajectory. A simple implementation of this versatile approach is described and experimentally validated. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America