The dependence of evanescent wave polarization on the losses of guided optical modes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how losses in guided optical modes influence the polarization of evanescent waves, revealing a polarization-loss locking phenomenon with implications for near-field coupling and source excitation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of the entanglement between waveguide losses and evanescent wave polarization, establishing a polarization-loss mapping on the Poincaré sphere.

Findings

Losses are linked to specific polarization states of evanescent waves.

Optimized dipoles for unidirectional coupling must consider waveguide losses.

Complex wavevector formalism offers advantages in source spectrum analysis.

Abstract

Spin-momentum locking of evanescent waves describes the relationship between the propagation constant of an evanescent mode and the polarization of its electromagnetic field, giving rise to applications in light nano-routing and polarimetry among many others. The use of complex numbers in physics is a powerful representation in areas such as quantum mechanics or electromagnetism; it is well known that a lossy waveguide can be modelled with the addition of an imaginary part to the propagation constant. Here we explore how these losses are entangled with the polarization of the associated evanescent tails for the waveguide, revealing a well-defined mapping between waveguide losses and the Poincar\'e sphere of polarizations, in what could be understood as a "polarization-loss locking" of evanescent waves. We analyse the implications for near-field directional coupling of sources to waveguides, as optimized dipoles must take into account the losses for a perfectly unidirectional excitation. We also reveal the potential advantage of calculating the angular spectrum of a source defined in a complex, rather than the traditionally purely real, transverse wavevector space formalism.