Design of a blazed grating consisting of metallic subwavelength binary grooves

Abstract The design of metallic surface relief gratings, which have predicted diffraction efficiencies about 90%, is discussed. The grooves consist of a minilattice of subwavelength microstructures with a binary profile. The phases of the microstructures can be chosen using simple approximate models which are shown to be in reasonable agreement with the rigorously calculated phases. Rigorous calculations of the diffraction efficiencies of the resulting superlattice designs show a strong blazed effect.