Polarization manipulation on step-index composite polymer beam splitters for photonics circuitry

Heliyon. 2024 Jan 17;10(3):e24585. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e24585. eCollection 2024 Feb 15.

Abstract

This paper presents composite beam splitters realized with polymer materials for developing photonic integrated circuits. We used organic-inorganic hybrid polymer materials to form this composite beam splitter realized with step-index (SI) core profiles. We used the alternating direction implicit technique of the Rsoft CAD BeamPROP solver to design and analyze these beam splitters. We successfully examined and manipulated the beam splitter's polarization dependency to obtain a 99% output efficiency with a 50:50 splitting ratio. The SI beam splitter exhibits an excess loss of 0.014 dB. When we apply polarized light in this beam splitter, the excess loss increases to 2 dB, and this loss gradually decreases as the angle of incident light increases. The excess loss reduces to 0.05 dB at the 31-degree angles of the incident polarized light. We also investigated the crosstalk of this beam splitter by varying the wavelength, and it is evident that the lowest crosstalk is -19.77 dB at the polarized angle of 31°.

Keywords: Alternating direction implicit (ADI) method; Composite coupler; Polarization manipulation; Polymer optical waveguides; Step-index core.