Depolarization remote sensing by orthogonality breaking.

A new concept devoted to sensing the depolarization strength of materials from a single measurement is proposed and successfully validated on a variety of samples. It relies on the measurement of the orthogonality breaking between two orthogonal states of polarization after interaction with the material to be characterized. Due to orthogonality preservation between the two states after propagation in birefringent media, this measurement concept is shown to be perfectly suited to depolarization remote sensing through fibers, opening the way to real-time depolarization endoscopy.