Filled liquid crystal depolarizers

The construction and properties of scattering type liquid crystal depolariz ers are discussed. The Mueller matrices that describe these devices are mea sured and compared to ideal depolarizers and ideal linear materials. The pr esent depolarizers do not perform as well as crystal pseudodepolarizers. Ne vertheless, when polarized light is incident on one of these devices the po larization of the transmitted light can be uniform to within 5%. These devi ces have the advantage that they can be made to areas as large as 30-30 cm or larger, are inexpensive, and can be electrically switched off and on. (C ) 2001 American Institute of Physics.