A novel method for the design of a full Stokes polarimeter based on dielectric metasurfaces

Full Stokes polarization detection is essential to obtain the polarization information of the object. The traditional full Stokes polarization detection system is mainly based on the polarization filtering method, but its energy efficiency limit is 50%. Polarization detectors based on dielectric metasurfaces can overcome this limitation. In this paper, we propose a new method to design a full Stokes polarization detection metasurface based on polarization beam splitting. The circular polarizatied beam splitting metasurface is designed based on the improved PB phase equation, and the linearly polarized beam splitting metasurface is based on the continuous modulation of the phase by the metasurface. Each polarized beam splitting metasurface is a bifocal metalens whose function is to orthogonally decompose and focus the incident light. The numerical aperture of metalens is 0.9. Numerical simulation shows that at 420 nm wavelength, the error of reconstructed Stokes parameters is less than 0.03, and the transmission efficiency is 66.28%. In the wavelength range of 400–446 nm, the metasurface still has high performance. The metasurface has great potential in ultra-compact polarization detection systems.