Compact TE-pass polarizer based on silicon-on-insulator platform with bimetallic rhodium–silver grating

Abstract

An ultra-compact hybrid plasmonic grating based transverse electric (TE) pass polarizer using SOI platform is proposed and analyzed. The reported structure utilizes bi-metallic grating of noble metals; rhodium (Rh) and silver (Ag) as plasmonic materials to get benefit from their attractive properties. The rhodium is a corrosion-free, nonoxidizing, and chemically inert against aggressive chemicals noble metal. In conjunction with the use of Ag, Rh ensures better plasmonic response. The bi-metallic combination Ag/Rh exhibits large coupling between the quasi transverse magnetic mode confined in the silicon core and the surface plasmon mode constructed at the dielectric/metal interface, while the TE-mode can propagate with minimal losses. The modal characteristics of the proposed device are numerically investigated using full vectorial finite difference method, while the propagation analysis is performed using finite difference time domain method via Lumerical software package. The numerical results show that the TE-pass polarizer of a compact device length (LD) = 3.5 μm offers an extinction ratio (ER) of 36.6 dB and an insertion loss (IL) of about 0.8 dB at λ = 1.55 μm. Additionally, the reported polarizer is robust to fabrication errors keeping the ER larger than 20 dB and the IL less than 1 dB despite changing the geometrical parameters by ±10% in the wavelength range of 1.4 to 1.7 μm.