Compensation for thermally induced birefringence in polycrystalline ceramic active elements

Polycrystalline ceramics differ significantly from single crystals in that the crystallographic axes (and hence of the axes of thermally induced birefringence) are oriented randomly in each granule of the ceramic. The quaternion formalism is employed to calculate the depolarisation in the ceramics and the efficiency of its compensation. The obtained analytic expressions are in good agreement with the numerical relations. It is shown that the larger the ratio of the sample length to the granule size, the closer the properties of the ceramics to those of a single crystal with the [111] orientation (in particular, the uncompensated depolarisation is inversely proportional to this ratio).