Waveguide Metacouplers for In-Plane Polarimetry

The state of polarization (SOP) is an inherent property of the vectorial nature of light and a crucial parameter in a wide range of remote sensing applications. Nevertheless, the SOP is rather cumbersome to probe experimentally, as conventional detectors respond only to the intensity of the light, hence losing the phase information between orthogonal vector components. In this work, we propose a type of polarimeter that is compact and well suited for in-plane optical circuitry while allowing for immediate determination of the SOP through simultaneous retrieval of the associated Stokes parameters. The polarimeter is based on plasmonic phase-gradient birefringent metasurfaces that facilitate normal incident light to launch in-plane photonic-waveguide modes propagating in six predefined directions with the coupling efficiencies providing a direct measure of the incident SOP. The functionality and accuracy of the polarimeter, which essentially is an all-polarization-sensitive waveguide metacoupler, is confirmed through full-wave simulations at the operation wavelength of 1.55 mu m.