Performance evaluation of a bigrating as a beam splitter

Abstract

The design of a bigrating for use as a beam splitter is presented. It is based on a rigorous formulation of plane-wave scattering by a big-rating that is composed of two individual gratings oriented in different directions. Numerical results are carried out to optimize the design of a bigrating to perform 1 x 4 beam splitting in two dimensions and to examine its fabrication and operation tolerances. It is found that a bigrating can be designed to perform two functions: beam splitting and polarization purification. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.