Design of a 50/50 splitting ratio non-polarizing beam splitter based on the modal method with fused-silica transmission gratings

Abstract

The optical design of a beam splitter that has a 50/50 splitting ratio regardless of the polarization is presented. The non-polarizing beam splitter (NPBS) is based on the fused-silica rectangular transmission gratings with high intensity tolerance. The modal method has been used to estimate the effective index of the modes excited in the grating region for TE and TM polarizations. If a phase difference equals an odd multiples of π/2 for the first two modes (i.e. modes 0 and 1), the incident light will be diffracted into the 0 and −1 orders with about 50% and 50% diffraction efficiency for TM and TE polarizations, respectively.