Abstract. A simple shearing polarization interferometer was used to investigate the effect of the inhomogeneous distributed absorption in the gap formed by a glass prism and a metal attenuator on the complex amplitude of the reflected field. A perfect tree layered system is considered so that the gap can be regarded as a plane parallel micro cuvette. In our case this cuvette is filled with a liquid with Gaussian distribution of the extinction coefficient (the imaginary part of the complex index of refraction). From this follows a proportional variation of the optical thickness of the separation between the prism boundary and the attenuator face and specific distribution of the phase shift between the p- and s-components of the reflected field. The interferometer allows to separate these two components and to let them interfere [1]. The phase shift distribution along the aperture of the beam can be determined from the interference signal. An experiment with a glass prism-liquid-plane silicon attenuator is described. The results are compared with the theoretical predictions. For angles of incidence larger than the critical one a good agreement between theory and experiment was observed.

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