Wide-angle High-Performance Polarizers Based on All-Elliptical-metamaterial One-Dimensional Photonic Crystals

As a class of all-dielectric metamaterials, elliptical metamaterials (EMMs) with elliptical iso-frequency curves provide a lossless platform to manipulate light with unity efficiency. Herein, we select two kinds of EMMs as the elements to constitute a special class of one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystals (PCs) called all-EMM 1D PCs and realize polarization-sensitive photonic bandgaps (PBGs). Enabled by the polarization-sensitive property of the PBG, we achieve a wide-angle high-performance polarizer. The maximum polarization extinction ratio reaches 1.82 × 104 and the width of the operating angle range reaches 36.07°. Besides, the performance of the polarizer demonstrates robustness against the layer thickness. The all-EMM 1D PCs are 1D nanostructures completely consisting of dielectric thin films, which can be much easily fabricated compared with 2D and 3D nanostructures. Our work provides a lithography-free recipe to design wide-angle high-performance polarizers.