Metamaterial-inspired compact optical coating for broadband polarization beam splitting.

A metal-dielectric is designed and fabricated as a compact polarization beam splitter. High p-polarized transmission is achieved by admittance matching, which is developed using a normalized admittance diagram. High s-polarized reflection is achieved with a metal-like equivalent s-polarized admittance which real part is much smaller than its imaginary part. An ultra-thin silver film with a thickness of around 11 nm is deposited to form an Ag-SiO2 multilayer. The polarization beam splitter requires only three or five layers of thin films to perform broadband beam splitting over wavelengths from 450 nm to 850 nm.