Subwavelength grating metamaterial engineering: A new tool for silicon photonics

Subwavelength gratings (SWGs) are periodic structures with a pitch smaller than half the wavelength of the propagating light, so they behave as an equivalent homogeneous birefringent metamaterial. SWGs have found innumerable applications in the field of integrated optics over the past ten years, most of them implemented in the Silicon-on-Insulator platform (SOI). In this talk we will summarize some of our recent contributions in the development of SWG waveguide devices for near and mid-infrared wavelengths.