Shanghai Opto-mechanical Institute first developed high-performance polarization beam splitter using quartz glass

Recently, the Zhou Changhe Group of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed high-density plasma etching equipment, semiconductor lithography technology and laser holography technology to develop quartz glass deep etching technology, and successfully processed the optimized depth on the quartz glass substrate. Wavelength grating, which has been proved to have high polarization isolation and diffraction efficiency, is a very good polarization spectroscopic device. The device has the advantages of long service life, low mold resistance, stability, reliability, and good thermal stability. This work has already applied for invention patents and was published in the international journal Optics Letters 32, 1299.

Polarizing beamsplitters are the basic components in optics and are widely used in optical experiments and optical instruments. The so-called polarization splitting is to spatially divide the light of different polarization into different directions. The commonly implemented methods include a birefringent crystal, a polarizing multilayer film, and a polymer film. However, the birefringent crystal is expensive, the polarizing multilayer film is complicated in process, high in cost, and the polymer film has large absorption loss and the like. The development of polarizing beamsplitters using quartz glass is a new approach that differs from these approaches. Quartz glass is an isotropic material that exhibits the same performance for different polarized light. The magic of this technique is that it can transform ordinary isotropic quartz materials into devices with excellent polarization splitting properties, while quartz glass materials. It has a wide light transmission spectrum, small thermal expansion coefficient and low cost. Therefore, deep etching sub-wavelength quartz grating devices have a good application prospect.