- #1
Niriel
- 1
- 0
Hello,
I keep myself busy by trying to model/predict standing waves in the optical path of a heterodyne spectrometer we built in our lab.
We split and combine the local oscillator and the sky (it's for astronomy) with a beam splitter. Our beam splitters are wire grid polarizers.
The Idea is simple: if our wire grid is in the (y;z) plane, with the wires along the z axis, then:
First question:
What happens to the x component of E ? E does have a component along x since the TEM wave can hit the grid at any angle.
Second question:
Modeling the grid at order 0 is trivial: just set up a matrix for a 4-port device with zeros and ones in it for each polarization. But reality is not that simple, and I need to include parameters such as the width of the wires, their spacing, and the resistivity of their metal. Also, I need to keep the phase information.
How would you approach the problem ? I imagine that there is something smarter to do than brute-forcing Maxwell.
I keep myself busy by trying to model/predict standing waves in the optical path of a heterodyne spectrometer we built in our lab.
We split and combine the local oscillator and the sky (it's for astronomy) with a beam splitter. Our beam splitters are wire grid polarizers.
The Idea is simple: if our wire grid is in the (y;z) plane, with the wires along the z axis, then:
- the z component of the electric field E of the incident wave is reflected
- and the y component passes through.
First question:
What happens to the x component of E ? E does have a component along x since the TEM wave can hit the grid at any angle.
Second question:
Modeling the grid at order 0 is trivial: just set up a matrix for a 4-port device with zeros and ones in it for each polarization. But reality is not that simple, and I need to include parameters such as the width of the wires, their spacing, and the resistivity of their metal. Also, I need to keep the phase information.
How would you approach the problem ? I imagine that there is something smarter to do than brute-forcing Maxwell.