Characterizing Beam Polarization

In this final part of our light characterization series, Manfred Gonnert will further define and characterize polarization. He will provide application examples to help with laser beam alignment, understanding polarization-handedness, manually measuring Stokes parameters, and preventing unwanted interference.
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[@Marco-xz7rf]

Really interesting. But i ask myself how polarization works with antennas? When I understand correctly 5G uses polarised light. Which should be quite hard as the receiving device can move freely. How does that work?

[@thorlabs]

Thank you for your questions! 5G uses frequencies around 40 GHz (close to WLAN, which has frequencies of 60 GHz). Although these are electro-magnetic waves, it is not visible light (100s of THz) but rather radio waves (100s of GHz to some THz). Polarization has been used for some time to gather more information that what could be gleaned from simply looking at the amplitude and frequency of the signal, as demonstrated by Radar Polarimetry. When using two polarization states, you have two channels, so you can transmit twice as much information. For analyzing the individual signals or channels, you do not measure the actual state of polarization but rather filter the signal for the polarization you would like to record and post-process.