No Arabic abstract
We report a new approach for the design and fabrication of thin wave plates with high transmission in the terahertz (THz) regime. The wave plates are based on strongly birefringent cut-wire pair metamaterials that exhibit refractive indices of opposite signs for two orthogonal polarization components of an incident wave. As specific examples, we fabricated and investigated a quarter- and a half-wave plate that revealed a peak intensity transmittance of 74% and 58% at 1.34 THz and 1.3 THz, respectively. Furthermore, the half wave plate displayed a maximum figure of merit (FOM) of 23 at 1.3 THz where the refractive index was -1.7. This corresponds to one of the highest FOMs reported at THz frequencies so far. The presented results evidence that negative index materials enter an application stage in terms of optical components for the THz technology.
We calculated the Fresnel paraxial propagator in a birefringent plate having topological charge $q$ at its center, named $q$-plate. We studied the change of the beam transverse profile when it traverses the plate. An analytical closed form of the beam profile propagating in the $q$-plate can be found for many important specific input beam profiles. We paid particular attention to the plate having a topological unit charge and we found that if small losses due to reflection, absorption and scattering are neglected, the plate can convert the photon spin into orbital angular momentum with up to 100% efficiency, provided the thickness of the plate is less than the Rayleigh range of the incident beam.
We examine the Seidel aberrations of thin spherical lenses composed of media with refractive index not restricted to be positive. We find that consideration of this expanded parameter space allows reduction or elimination of more aberrations than is possible with only positive index media. In particular we find that spherical lenses possessing real aplanatic focal points are possible only with negative index. We perform ray tracing, using custom code that relies only on Maxwells equations and conservation of energy, that confirms the results of the aberration calculations.
Optical properties of a metasurface which can be considered a monolayer of two classical uniaxial metamaterials, parallel-plate and nanorod arrays, are investigated. It is shown that such metasurface acts as an ultimately thin sub-50 nm wave plate. This is achieved via an interplay of epsilon-near-zero and epsilon-near-pole behavior along different axes in the plane of the metasurface allowing for extremely rapid phase difference accumulation in very thin metasurface layers. These effects are shown to not be disrupted by non-locality and can be applied to the design of ultrathin wave plates, Pancharatnam-Berry phase optical elements and plasmon-carrying optical torque wrench devices.
Birefringent materials or nanostructures that introduce phase differences between two linear polarizations underpin the operation of wave plates for polarization control of light. Here we develop metasurfaces realizing a distinct class of complex-birefringent wave plates, which combine polarization transformation with a judiciously tailored polarization-dependent phase retardance and amplitude filtering via diffraction. We prove that the presence of loss enables the mapping from any chosen generally non-orthogonal pair of polarizations to any other pair at the output. We establish an optimal theoretical design-framework based on pairwise nanoresonator structures and experimentally demonstrate unique properties of metasurfaces in the amplification of small polarization differences and polarization coupling with unconventional phase control. Furthermore, we reveal that these metasurfaces can perform arbitrary transformations of biphoton polarization-encoded quantum states, including the modification of the degree of entanglement. Thereby, such flat devices can facilitate novel types of multi-functional polarization optics for classical and quantum applications.
We have investigated the use of inkjet printing technology for the production of THz range wire-grid polarizers using time-domain terahertz spectroscopy (TDTS). Such technology affords an inexpensive and reproducible way of quickly manufacturing THz range metamaterial structures. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, numerous thin silver-nanoparticle ink lines were printed using a Dimatix DMP-2831 printer. We investigated the optimal printing geometry of the polarizers by examining a number of samples with printed wires of varying thickness and spacing. We also investigated the polarization properties of multiply-stacked polarizers.