Optical broadband angular filters based on staggered photonic structures

Abstract

The potential for use of staggered structures to provide optical broadband angular selectivity is proposed and verified. The numerical results show that the angular selectivity performance characteristics, including the range of the angular-selective region and the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the angular passband, can be tuned by adjusting the stagger parameter and the number of cells that compose the staggered structure. Therefore, a detailed procedure is given for the design of an angular filter based on a staggered structure with the desired angular-selective region and FWHM. Finally, to confirm the feasibility of fabrication of the designed structures, the error tolerance of this type of angular filter is studied and demonstrated using a statistical method.

Keywords:

• Staggered structure
• broadband angular selectivity
• Brewster’s law
• photonic bandgap
• error tolerance