Talbot effect analysis for periodic inhomogeneous polarization gratings

The interesting propagation properties of periodical gratings have been widely studied in the last decades. A special characteristic involving periodical structures is the self-imaging, in free propagation. Commonly the Talbot effect only consider the scalar nature of the fields, however the vectorial nature of the fields also plays an important role in free propagation. In this work, we study theoretically and experimentally the free propagation at fractional Talbot distances of inhomogeneous polarization periodical gratings, which are characterized by orthogonal polarization states. We found that the polarization states change in a peculiar way at different planes. We also generate some particular polarization gratings by means of a spatial light modulator and demonstrate that the theoretical and experimental results are in good agreement.