Polarization tunable all-dielectric color filters based on cross-shaped Si nanoantennas

Polarization sensitive and insensitive color filters have important applications in the area of nano-spectroscopy and CCD imaging applications. Metallic nanostructures provide an efficient way to design and engineer ultrathin color filters. These nanostructures have capability to split the white light into fundamental colors and enable color filters with ultrahigh resolution but their efficiency can be restricted due to high losses in metals especially at the visible wavelengths. In this work, we demonstrate all-dielectric color filters based on Si nanoantennas, which are sensitive to incident-wave polarization and, thus, tunable with the aid of polarization angle variation. Two different information can be encoded in two different polarization states in one nanostructure. The nanoantenna based pixels are highly efficient and can provide high quality of colors, in particular, due to low losses in Si at optical frequencies. We experimentally demonstrate that a variety of colors can be achieved by changing the physical size of the nonsymmetric cross-shaped nanoantennas. The proposed devices allow to cover an extended gamut of colors on CIE-1931 chromaticity diagram owing to the existence of high-quality resonances in Si nanoantennas. Significant tunability of the suggested color filters can be achieved by varying polarization angle in both transmission and reflection mode. Additional tunability can be obtained by switching between transmission and reflection modes.

Publication year:2017