Wang Shuai, Deng Zi-Lan, Wang Yujie, Zhou Qingbin, Wang Xiaolei, Cao Yaoyu, Guan Bai-Ou, Xiao Shumin, Li Xiangping
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan University, 510632, Guangzhou, China.
Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Key Lab of Micro-Nano Optoelectronic Information System, Harbin Institute of Technology, 518055, Shenzhen, China.
Light Sci Appl. 2021 Jan 27;10(1):24. doi: 10.1038/s41377-021-00468-y.
The control of polarization, an essential property of light, is of broad scientific and technological interest. Polarizers are indispensable optical elements for direct polarization generation. However, arbitrary polarization generation, except that of common linear and circular polarization, relies heavily on bulky optical components such as cascading linear polarizers and waveplates. Here, we present an effective strategy for designing all-in-one full Poincaré sphere polarizers based on perfect arbitrary polarization conversion dichroism and implement it in a monolayer all-dielectric metasurface. This strategy allows preferential transmission and conversion of one polarization state located at an arbitrary position on the Poincaré sphere to its handedness-flipped state while completely blocking its orthogonal state. In contrast to previous methods that were limited to only linear or circular polarization, our method manifests perfect dichroism of nearly 100% in theory and greater than 90% experimentally for arbitrary polarization states. By leveraging this attractive dichroism, our demonstration of the generation of polarization beams located at an arbitrary position on a Poincaré sphere directly from unpolarized light can substantially extend the scope of meta-optics and dramatically promote state-of-the-art nanophotonic devices.
光的偏振控制是光的一项基本属性，具有广泛的科学和技术意义。偏振器是直接产生偏振光不可或缺的光学元件。然而，除了常见的线偏振和圆偏振外，任意偏振态的产生严重依赖于诸如级联线性偏振器和波片等庞大的光学元件。在此，我们提出一种基于完美任意偏振转换二向色性设计一体化全庞加莱球偏振器的有效策略，并在单层全介质超表面中予以实现。该策略允许位于庞加莱球上任意位置的一种偏振态优先透射并转换为其手性翻转态，同时完全阻挡其正交态。与以往仅限于线偏振或圆偏振的方法不同，我们的方法理论上表现出近乎100%的完美二向色性，对于任意偏振态，实验上大于90%。通过利用这种引人注目的二向色性，我们直接从非偏振光产生位于庞加莱球上任意位置的偏振光束的演示能够大幅扩展超光学的范围，并极大地推动最先进的纳米光子器件的发展。
