Firstly, you should know the retardation, is it a half waveplate or a quarter waveplate? Or even a special retardation? Then, you should know the size and working wavelength. This is important for waveplate. The retardation is different at different wavelength. It depends on wavelength.
After confirm these conditions, we should choose a type of waveplate. If temperature bandwidth and wavelength bandwidth is important for you, you should choose zero order or true zero order. For zero order, optical contacted has better wavefront distortion and parallelism, air spaced has high damage threshold.
True zero order is better than zero order waveplate at all parameters and can be used at more critical application. When temperature bandwidth and wavelength bandwidth is not a problem for you, multi order is a better choice, it is cheap. If a zero order or true zero order waveplate does not offer retardance over a wide enough wavelength band, one solution is to use an achromatic waveplate, it has over hundreds of nanometers bandwidth.
For detailed information, please refer to above table or contact us.
