Building polarimeters with liquid crystal cells

This work presents three Stokes polarimeters based on liquid crystal cells. First, an instrument based on two parallel aligned liquid crystal cells, then a polarimeter based on a single twisted nematic liquid crystal cell and finally an instrument with two ferroelectric liquid crystal cells. In each case, we show the design of the instrument and the optimization conducted in order to reduce noise propagation. In addition, we discuss the strengths of each prototype.