Polarization-selective absorptive and transmissive metamaterials

Abstract

A polarization sorting metamaterial with polarization filtering and absorption is proposed. When unpolarized incident light strikes the metamaterial, one polarization component is completely absorbed, and the other polarization component is completely transmitted. We achieved an absorption extinction ratio of up to 350 and a transmission extinction ratio of 425 simultaneously in the LWIR. Unlike the 50% energy utilization limit of other polarization absorbers due to the complete reflection of another polarization component, our proposed metamaterial can be composed of layered polarization selective absorption devices to achieve more than 90% energy utilization. Therefore our design can provide a new solution for real-time polarization detection.