V L Ginzburg's helical elliptically polarized modes and their application

In 1943, V L Ginzburg derived a simple and elegant solution to the polarization optics problem when a linear birefringent medium is uniformly twisted along the optical axis. In a torsion-comoving coordinate frame, mutually orthogonal polarization eigenmodes, i.e., helical modes, of such an optical medium are characterized by two ellipses with the electric field vector of light bypassed in the opposite sense. Current applications of V L Ginzburg's theory are reviewed.