The connection between polarization calculus and four-dimensional rotations

Abstract: We review the well-known polarization optics matrix methods, i.e., Jones and Stokes-Mueller calculus, and show how they can be formulated in terms of four-dimensional (4d) rotations of the four independent electromagnetic field quadratures. Since 4d rotations is a richer description than the conventional Jones and Stokes-Mueller calculi, having six rather than four degrees of freedom (DOF), we propose an extension of those calculi to handle all six DOF. For the Stokes-Mueller analysis, this leads to a novel and potentially useful extension that accounts for the absolute phase of the optical field, and which can be valuable in the areas where the optical phase is of interest, e.g. interferometry or coherent communications. As examples of the usefulness we use the formalism to explain the Pancharatnam phase by parallel transport, and shows its connection with the Berry phase. In addition we show that the two extra DOF in the 4d description represents unphysical transformations, forbidden for propagating photons, since they will not obey the fundamental quantum mechanical boson commutation relations.