The design of a polarizing beam splitter made from a dielectric rectangular-groove grating

It has been reported that a polarizing beam splitter based on a rectangular-groove grating (a grating polarizing beam splitter) can be easily designed for specific applications using the modal method. In this paper, the eigenvalue equation of the modal method is transformed to a new form. Using this new form of the eigenvalue equation, it is shown that the design of a grating polarizing beam splitter can be independent of the incident wavelength. The period and the groove depth can be designed using values normalized to the incident wavelength, which apply to a range of wavelengths as long as the effects of dispersion can be neglected. Numerical simulations of fused silica gratings are presented and analyzed. It is concluded that the preferable choice for the grating period is 0.8–0.9 times the incident wavelength.