Rotating Twisted Templates for Imprinting Polarization Gratings with a Sub- to Dozen-Micron Period

In this Letter, we report and experimentally demonstrate what is to our knowledge a novel scheme for imprinting polarization gratings (PGs) with a pair of templates. Compared with the traditional method that a single template can only imprint PG with a single period, cascading two templates can control the period of imprinted PG at will. However, the low diffraction efficiency is inevitably caused by cascading two templates. Therefore, a rigorous coupled wave analysis (RCWA) is adopted to design a multi -twisted template to address this challenge. As a proof of concept, two multi -twisted templates with a period of 1.6 mu m were fabricated, and PGs with a large period range from 0.4 to 48.6 mu m were successfully imprinted. The proposed scheme is expected to enable rapid, robust, and high -quality mass production of beam steering, large -angle deflectors, and diffractive optical couplers. (c) 2024 Optica Publishing Group. All rights, including for text and data mining (TDM), Artificial Intelligence (AI) training, and similar technologies, are reserved.