Abstract
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.
Highlights
Polarization control is essential for tailoring light–matter interactions and is the foundation for many applications, such as polarization imaging[1,2], nonlinear optics[3,4], data storage[5,6], and information multiplexing[7,8,9]
As seen from Eq 1, the output polarization is heavily dependent upon the incident beam, which restricts its operation to well-defined incident polarizations that typically result from an additional linear polarizer
Their far-field interference and collective contributions can be exquisitely tailored by the length, width, and orientation of the nanopillar pairs illuminated by different polarizations, leading to perfect transmissive dichroism for arbitrary orthogonal polarization pairs on demand
Summary
Polarization control is essential for tailoring light–matter interactions and is the foundation for many applications, such as polarization imaging[1,2], nonlinear optics[3,4], data storage[5,6], and information multiplexing[7,8,9]. By combining the anisotropic dynamic phase with the geometric phase, independent phase retardation can be imposed on any pair of orthogonal polarization states[41]. Combining the geometric phase with the detour phase can allow simultaneous control of the spatially varying arbitrary polarization and phase profiles, leading to powerful vectorial hologram applications[29,34,43]. All of these metasurface polarization optics require an additional polarizer to generate incident beams with well-defined polarization, precluding their applicability in monolithic polarization generators working directly with unpolarized light
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