opticspolarizationvisible-light
Well, we know that circularly/elliptically polarized light is made up from orthogonal components. So is it possible then to create circularly/elliptically polarized light by combining horizontally and vertically polarized light? It seems to make perfect sense to me.
EDIT: Clarification: I mean by creating circularly/elliptically polarized light in the laboratory (though beam-splitters ?, I don't know) by combining different light beams of horizontally/vertically polarized light.
Have a look at this Wikipedia page, it explains the difference between a fast axis and a slow axis. But essentially it is to do with the properties of a birefringent crystal.
Firstly, you could consult the Thor Labs manual/booklet that you have got with the equipment, that should sort out your confusion for you. I'm guessing it is the angle away from the fast axis. But since (as far as I remember) the angular scale can be detached and put back onto the polarizer, it will help if you calibrate your polarizer with some known light before you make any measurements with it.
As daaxix has pointed out, you could use Stoke's parameters to characterize the light. There are several standard experiments in the literature to determine the Stoke's parameters.
If you send a linearly polarized beam through a quarter wave plate, it will in general come out elliptically polarized. You could confirm this by putting another polarizer (with a known polarization axis) after your first polarizer and rotate that with respect to the first polarizer, and then measure the intensity. The resulting intensity will be constant with angle if your light is circularly polarized, or it will vary (the variation will be larger than your experimental error) if the light is elliptically polarized.
You need to mix them incoherently. If the beams are from different sources, then you're pretty much there, as they won't stay in phase.
You can't represent incoherent light with Jones vectors (2 components), but you can do it with density matrices (this approach has a huge importance in quantum mechanics, where incoherent mixtures are most important). So, 2×2 matrices, formed as time averages of tensor product of the Jones vector with itself. The meaning of the matrix is the correlation of components: diagonal terms are the energy fluxes (remember - it's amplitude squared), and the off-diagonal terms are cross-correlations between polarizations. There are no cross-correlations if they are incoherently mixed (unpolarized) so incoherent light has diagonal matrices. Anything between totally polarized and totally unpolarized light is likewise describable by this. Trace of the matrix is the total energy flux.
Coherent mixtures add as vectors. Incoherent mixtures add as matrices.
Consider this $x$ and $y$ polarizations: $E_x=(1,0)$ and $E_y=(0,1)$. Associated matrix: $$D_x^{ij}=E_x^i E_x^j=\begin{bmatrix}1&0\\0 & 0\end{bmatrix}$$ $$D_y^{ij}=E_y^i E_y^j=\begin{bmatrix}0&0\\0 & 1\end{bmatrix}$$
Coherent mixture: $E=E_x+E_y=(1,1)$ (diagonal polarization). The matrix for this: $$D^{ij}=E^i E^j=\begin{bmatrix}1&1\\1 & 1\end{bmatrix}$$
Incoherent mixture: $$D_x^{ij}+D_y^{ij}=\begin{bmatrix}1&0\\0 & 1\end{bmatrix}$$
So, to reiterate... mixing correlated beams (meaning it's from the same source, usually the same beam passed through polarizers, optically active materials, anisotropic plates and so on) creates polarized states. Polarized states are those for which the matrix can be split into a "square" of a single vector. Mixing uncorrelated beams produces a state that can't be written as a "square" of a single vector, and thus can't be reduced to the simple formalism. But you can always work with density matrices.
Formalism for working with matrices is similar to that for vectors, but you need to apply all the transforms on both sides.
How to get from physics to math? Imagine a single beam:
$$\vec{E}(t)=y(t)\vec{E}$$ That is, amplitude times polarization. Now consider two such beams. Compute the energy flux, which is a time average of the square. Mark averages as $\langle\rangle$. Consider also multiplying this by the jones matrix before calculating the square and integrating. So, we have this expression for the flux (ignore the constant factors of speed of light and stuff like that):
$$j=\langle(A^{ij}(y_1(t){E}_1^j+y_2(t){E}_2^j)^2\rangle$$ $$=\langle A^{ik}A^{ij}(y_1(t){E}_1^j+y_2(t){E}_2^j)(y_1(t){E}_1^k+y_2(t){E}_2^k)\rangle$$ $$=A^{ik}A^{ij}\langle(y_1^2(t){E}_1^j{E}_1^k+y_2^2(t){E}_2^j{E}_2^k+y_1 (t)y_2(t){E}_1^j{E}_2^k+y_2 (t)y_1(t){E}_2^j{E}_1^k\rangle=A^{ik}A^{ij}D^{jk}=Tr(ADA^T)$$ Now you know also why we need to preserve the whole matrix, not just the trace. Whatever Jones matrices you applied to the initial mixture of light, you need all four components of the density matrix to compute the product before taking the trace.
Now observe the averaged part. If $y_1$ and $y_2$ are incoherent, then the long term average of their product will give zero. In that case, you get only the diagonal terms. If they are at least partially coherent, the off diagonal terms will be nonzero. Remember that autocorrelations and cross-correlations drop off with time delay even for coherent beam, so if you use a beam splitter and rejoin the beams with time delay, you'll lose correlations. That's actually how you measure time coherence of the beam.
Anyway, we just reproduced the whole reasoning of how to deal with coherent/incoherent/partially coherent polarized light. All we needed is the fact that locally, amplitudes are additive, but when you time-average the intensity (flux, proportional to the amplitude squared), the result depends on how the beams are correlated (you may have more than 2, this was just an example). The density matrix formalism emerged out automatically, and their meaning too.
No beam is completely coherent with itself on long term (only a perfect sine wave would do that). There's always drop in coherence when you delay the beam with itself. That's what autocorrelation function is all about. Unless you have some funny light source with atypical correlation profile, you'll have exponentially decaying autocorrelation function with the characteristic time proportional to the inverse frequency bandwidth of the light (basically, the uncertainty principle). Beams from unrelated sources are never coherent at all. Think of two cars with blinkers on: unless they are powered by the same signal, they'll never blink in synchrony for long (on average, they'll be in opposite phase for as much time as in phase, which would make the cross-correlation - the average product - equal to zero).
Heads up: if you're dealing with complex amplitudes (required if you want to handle circular polarizations), then one of the terms in the product must be complex conjugated and matrix transpose becomes hermitian conjugate.
Best Answer
Yes, this is possible. The device that makes this possible is called a polarizing beam splitter, which will transmit or reflect light according to its polarization. Thus, it will split diagonal or circular light into its horizontal and vertical components, and when used in reverse it will undo the process (it has to).
Note, however, that you will in general require a pretty exceptional interferometric stability to achieve this. You certainly require both beams to originate from the same source so that they have a definite phase relationship to each other; you would split the beam in two, polarize it in different directions, add a delay stage to control the relative phase, and then combine them using a polarizing beam splitter. The thing is, though, that you need the relative delay to be very tightly controlled, as a few tens of nanometers of difference in the path length will change the polarization from diagonal to circular. This is essentially doable but it is and fiddly, and requires very careful alignment - but that is optical physics in a nutshell.