Optical Measurement of Electric Field Vector Distribution in a Liquid Insulator

Abstract

We have been carried out the measurement of the three-dimensional nonuniform electric field distribution using Kerr electrooptic measurement with a reconstruction technique. A conventional optical system was composed of a He-Ne laser, a polarizer, a quarter-wave plate, an experimental cell, an analyzer, and a photodetector. For the measurement of a field vector by the system, it was necessary to measure light intensity two times with changing the optical axis of three optical wedges, i. e., the polarizer, the quarter-wave plate and the analyzer. We improved the expression of the relationship between a measured light intensity and a phase shift due to Kerr effect. The validity was confirmed by experiments. The optical system improved by using linear image sensors and a non-polarizing cube beam splitter, made it possible that the electric filed distribution was measured faster. The measured distributions were compared with the theoretical ones calculated by analytical method.