High-performance photoelastic modulator for polarization modulation spectrometer.

A high-performance photoelastic modulator (PEM) has been built. It consists of a home-made PEM head and a home-built PEM driver that is based on the principle of the phase-locked loop (PLL) (PLL PEM driver). It was installed in our new type circular dichroism (CD) spectrometer for visible light region and its performance was evaluated. With the phase angle being set exactly to zero, the PEM is found to be about eight times more efficient than commercially available one. The efficiency of PEM depends not only on the efficiency of PEM driver but also on the quality of PEM head. The latter can be estimated from admittance-parameter measurements without installing it into a spectrometer. With substituting the PLL PEM driver for a conventional one, the PEM drive voltage can be reduced from one-half to one-third and the baseline shift for air blank that is a measure of the total performance of polarization modulation spectrometers becomes quite small.