A half wave retarder made of bilayer subwavelength metallic apertures

We demonstrate a half wave plate whose principle of operation is based on the strong evanescent field coupling between two metal layers with arrays of subwavelength slits. The device is divided into two kinds of pixels in which the slits are oriented in orthogonal directions. By tuning the phase delay of the transmitted light through the lateral displacement between the top and bottom layers, the polarization of linearly polarized light at 1.55 mu m can be rotated by up to 90 degrees. The polarization extinction ratio of the transmitted light exceeds 22 dB. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3579245]