Polarization control and measurement with meta-optics

Metasurfaces are artificially engineered arrays of subwavelength phase-shifting elements which, if designed with explicit polarization dependence, provide a fascinating platform for new polarization optics. In this thesis, we present metasurface diffraction gratings designed to produce arbitrarily specified polarization states on a set of defined diffraction orders, given that the polarization of the incident beam is known. The metasurface diffraction gratings are designed using gradient-descent optimization, followed by a metasurface specific optimization scheme. We also design and implement a metasurface grating that, when used in the reverse configuration, may be used as a parallel snapshot polarimeter, requiring minimum of standard bulk polarization optics. We demonstrate its use in measuring partially polarized light, and show its performance compares favourably with a commercial polarimeter: for the degree of polarization (DOP) measurements we observed a standard deviation of [sigma]= 1.6% and a mean difference of [mu] = 0.6%, and for the state of polarization (SOP) parameters azimuth [chi] and ellipticity [epsilon], we observe standard deviations of [sigma]= 1.320 and [sigma]= 0.43' respectively. This work is of potential interest in any application requiring compact, lightweight and low cost polarization dependent optics, polarization sensing, or polarization imaging.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Zaidi, Muhammad Aun Abbas.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rajeev J. Ram and Federico Capasso.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122743

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122743