Manipulate light polarizations by metamaterials: From microwave to optics

Recently, artificially designed metamaterials have become of considerable interests, because they exhibit extraordinary optical characteristics that do not exist in nature and promise many potential applications, such as negative refraction, subwavelength imaging, and electromagnetic invisibility cloaking. Although creating metamaterials at the optical frequency range faces numerous technological challenges, such materials with particular properties have been realized gradually based on new device concepts. In this talk, we present our efforts to employ specific metamaterials to manipulate the polarization states of incident lights, in both microwave [1, 2] and optical frequency regimes [3]. Experimental results reveal that the maximum polarization conversion ratio (PCR) value can reach 100% in microwave regime (see left figure below) and 92% in optical frequency (see right figure blow) under certain conditions. Theoretical studies combined with numerical simulations show that the governing physics is dominated by the unique reflection properties of the metamaterials.