Artificial high birefringence in all-dielectric gradient grating for broadband terahertz waves

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 6; no. 1; p. 38562
• Main Authors: Chen, Meng, Fan, Fei, Xu, Shi-Tong, Chang, Sheng-Jiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 09.12.2016; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 142/126; 639/624/400/2797; 639/624/400/561; Birefringence; Humanities and Social Sciences; Laboratories; multidisciplinary; Periodicity; Phase shift; Phase transitions; Polarization; Science; Silicon wafers
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/srep38562

Subwavelength dielectric gratings are widely applied in the phase and polarization manipulation of light. However, the dispersion of the normal dielectric gratings is not flat while their birefringences are not enough in the THz regime. In this paper, we have fabricated two all-dielectric gratings with gradient grids in the THz regime, of which artificial birefringence is much larger than that of the equal-grid dielectric grating demonstrated by both experiments and simulations. The transmission and dispersion characteristics are also improved since the gradient grids break the periodicity of grating lattices as a chirp feature. From 0.6–1.4 THz, a broadband birefringence reaches 0.35 with a low dispersion and good linearity of phase shift, and the maximum phase shift is 1.4π. Furthermore, these gradient gratings are applied as half-wave plates and realize a linear polarization conversion with a conversion rate over 99%, also much higher than the equal-grid gratings. These gradient gratings show great advantages compared to the periodic gratings and provide a new way in the designing of artificial birefringence material.