Everything about Beam Splitter totally explained
A
beam splitter is an
optical device that splits a beam of
light in two. It is the crucial part of most
interferometers.
In its most common form, a cube, it's made from two triangular glass
prisms which are glued together at their base using
Canada balsam. The thickness of the resin layer is adjusted such that (for a certain
wavelength) half of the light incident through one "port" (for example face of the cube) is
reflected and the other half is transmitted.
Polarizing beam splitters, such as the
Wollaston prism, use
birefringent materials, splitting light into beams of differing
polarization.
Another design is the use of a half-silvered
mirror. This is a plate of
glass with a thin
coating of
aluminum (usually deposited from aluminum
vapor) with the thickness of the aluminum coating such that, of light incident at a 45 degree angle, one half is transmitted and one half is reflected. Instead of a metallic coating, a
dielectric optical coating may be used. Such mirrors are commonly used as
output couplers in
laser construction. Similarly, a very thin
pellicle film may also be used as a beam splitter.
A third version of the beam splitter is a
dichroic mirrored prism assembly which uses
dichroic optical coatings to split the incoming light into three beams, one each of red, green, and blue. Such a device was used in multi-tube color
television cameras and also in the three-film
Technicolor movie cameras. It is also used in the 3
LCD projectors to separate colors and in
ellipsoidal reflector spotlights to eliminate heat radiation.
Beam splitters are also used in
stereo photography to shoot stereo photos using a single shot with a non-stereo camera. The device attaches in place of the
lens of the camera. Some argue that "image splitter" is a more proper name for this device.
(External Link
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Beam splitters with single mode fiber for
PON networks use the single mode behavior to split the beam. The splitter is done by physically splicing two fibers "together" as an X.
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