Ultrathin plasmonic quarter waveplate using broken rectangular annular metasurface

We propose an ultrathin plasmonic metasurface-enabled quarter waveplate using a subwavelength broken rectangular annulus (BRA) arrays. The BRA structure is formed by two pairs of slits with perpendicular orientation embedded in a silver thin film. The elimination of the overlapping parts at four corners of a regular rectangular annulus increases significantly the phase anisotropy induced by localized surface plasmons, and thus decreases significantly the thickness of the metal film in order to achieve the required phase difference for a designed waveplate. Simulations show that an ultrathin quarter waveplate can be obtained with a as thin as 10 nm thickness of a silver BRA arrays at wavelength band of 1.55 µm which provides great potential in advancing manufacture of nanophotonic devices.