Photosensitive materials are widely used for the direct fabrication of surface relief gratings (SRGs) without the selective etching of the material. It is known that the interferometric approach makes it possible to fabricate SRGs with submicron and even subwavelength periods. However, to change the period of the written SRGs, it is necessary to change the convergence angle, shift a sample, and readjust the interferometric setup. Recently, it was shown that structured laser beams with predetermined, periodically modulated polarization distributions can also be used to fabricate SRGs. A structured laser beam with the desired polarization distribution can be formed with just one polarizing optical element-for example, the so-called depolarizer, a patterned micro-retarder array. The use of such stacked elements makes it possible to directly control the modulation period of the polarization of the generated laser beam. We show that this approach allows one to fabricate SRGs with submicron periods. Moreover, the addition of q-plates, elements effectively used to generate cylindrical vector beams with polarization singularities, allows the efficient formation of fork polarization gratings (FPGs) and the fabrication of higher-order fork-shaped SRGs. Full control of the parameters of the generated FPGs is possible. We demonstrate the formation of FPGs of higher orders (up to 12) by only adding first- and second-order q-plates and half-wave plates to the depolarizers. In this work, we numerically and experimentally study the parameters of various types of SRGs formed using these stacked polarizing elements and show the significant potential of this method for the laser processing of photosensitive materials, which often also serve as polarization sensors.
Keywords: chalcogenide glasses; depolarizer; polarization gratings; q-plate; surface relief gratings.