Tuning the polarization state of enhanced transmission in gratings

types: ArticleCopyright © 2008 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 92 (2008) and may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2924317The polarization characteristics of enhanced transmission of lamellar gratings with structural dimensions on the subwavelength scale were studied and experimental results were compared to numerical models. The ability to tune the polarization state of the transmitted beam by varying the grating's structural parameters is discussed. Gratings were fabricated and tested in the microwave spectral region, and the results were compared to theoretically modeled results. Enhanced transmission produced by cavity modes was experimentally verified for both s-polarized and p-polarized incident beams of light. Applications of these results to photonic devices in the visible, infrared, and microwave spectral regions are discussed