Extraction of effective parameters of turbid media utilizing the Mueller matrix approach: study of glucose sensing

An analytical technique based on Stokes polarimetry and the Mueller matrix method is proposed for extracting the effective linear birefringence, linear dichroism, circular birefringence, circular dichroism, linear depolarization, and circular depolarization properties of turbid media. In contrast to existing analytical models, the model proposed extracts the effective parameters in a decoupled manner and considers not only the circular dichroism properties of the sample, but also the depolarization properties. The results show that the proposed method enables all of the effective parameters to be measured over the full range. Moreover, it is shown that the extracted value of the depolarization index is unaffected by the order in which the depolarizing Mueller matrix is decomposed during the extraction procedure. Finally, a method is proposed for calibrating the optical rotation angle of a polystyrene microsphere suspension containing dissolved D-glucose (C6H12O6) powder in accordance with the distance between the sample and the detector. The experimental results show that the sensitivity of the resulting D-glucose measurement is equal to approximately 1.73 deg/M. (C) 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI:10.1117/1.JBO.17.9.097002]