A High Extinction Ratio Plasmonic Waveguide Polarizer

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel plasmonic waveguide polarizer with a high extinction ratio achieved by multi-strip aluminum coating, demonstrating significant improvements over single-strip designs across a broad wavelength range.

Contribution

Introduces a new multi-strip aluminum coating method to enhance the extinction ratio of plasmonic waveguide polarizers, supported by simulation and experimental validation.

Findings

Extinction ratio exceeds 46 dB at 1550 nm

Achieves 26.8 dB at 980 nm

Multi-strip design outperforms single-strip configurations

Abstract

A novel method for increasing the extinction ratio of plasmonic waveguide polarizer has been investigated in this work. Aluminum was coated in a 20 microns multi-strips pattern on the top of a SU-8 waveguide to excite the surface plasmons. Simulation and experimental results have been shown the extinction ratio of the multi-strip polarizer is more than the single strip ones with the same total aluminum-coated length due to the coupling loss between Al coated and uncoated region and also the scattering at the edge of metal. This polarizer was characterized over a wide range of wavelengths and showed a high extinction ratio of 46 dB at 1550 nm and 26.8 dB at 980 nm wavelengths.