Full-Stokes parameters detection enabled by a non-interleaved fiber-compatible metasurface.

Area of Science:

• Optics and Photonics
• Materials Science
• Nanotechnology

Background:

• Light polarization is fundamental to light-matter interactions, crucial for applications like chiral spectroscopy, biomedical imaging, and machine vision.
• Metasurfaces have enabled miniaturized polarization detectors, but integrating them onto fiber end faces remains challenging due to area limitations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and demonstrate a compact, non-interleaved metasurface for full-Stokes parameter detection integrated onto a large-mode-area photonic crystal fiber (LMA-PCF) end face.
• To overcome the limitations of small working areas in current fiber-compatible polarization detectors.

Main Methods:

• Concurrent control of dynamic phase and Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase to assign distinct helical phases to orthogonal circular polarization bases.
• Utilizing two non-overlapped foci for amplitude contrast and an interference ring pattern for relative phase difference to represent polarization states.
• Simulating the metasurface performance and calculating full-Stokes parameters.

Main Results:

• The proposed metasurface successfully enables the determination of arbitrary polarization states.
• Simulation results show a low average detection deviation of 2.84% for 20 tested samples.
• The design overcomes the challenge of integrating polarization detectors onto small fiber end faces.

Conclusions:

• The developed ultracompact, fiber-compatible metasurface demonstrates excellent polarization detection performance.
• This work provides a pathway for practical exploration of miniaturized polarization detection devices.
• The integration of advanced metasurfaces on LMA-PCFs opens new possibilities for in-fiber optical sensing.