Lateral beam shifts and depolarization upon oblique reflection from dielectric mirrors

: Dielectric mirrors comprising thin-film multilayers are widely used in optical experiments because they can achieve substantially higher reflectance compared to metal mirrors. Here we investigate potential problems that can arise when dielectric mirrors are used at oblique incidence, in particular for focused beams. We found that light beams reflected from dielectric mirrors can experience lateral beam shifts, beam-shape distortion, and depolarization, and these effects have a strong dependence on wavelength, incident angle, and incident polarization. Because vendors of dielectric mirrors typically do not share the particular layer structure of their products, we designed and simulated several dielectric-mirror stacks, and then also measured the lateral beam shift from two commercial dielectric mirrors and one coated metal mirror. We hope that this paper brings awareness of the tradeoffs between dielectric mirrors and front-surface metal mirrors in certain optics experiments, and suggest that vendors of dielectric mirrors provide information about beam shifts, distortion, and depolarization when their products are used at oblique incidence. about 18 µm onto the mirrors with an incident angle of 45 ° . We varied the polarization angle of the incident light by rotating a half-wave plate. The mirror is mounted on a rear-loaded mirror mount where the mirror is inserted from the back and the mirror reflective surface is pushed against the mounting stop surface. This mounting mechanism allows the reflective surfaces of different mirrors to be fixed against the same stop surface regardless of the mirror thickness and enable the mirror to be switch without affecting the focus. The beam reflected from the mirror is then magnified 8 times onto the beam

[1]  N. S. Blunt,et al.  Multi-qubit entanglement and algorithms on a neutral-atom quantum computer , 2021, Nature.

[2]  M. Tomita,et al.  Giant and highly reflective Goos-Hänchen shift in a metal-dielectric multilayer Fano structure. , 2019, Optics express.

[3]  Bing Wang,et al.  Giant Goos-Hänchen shifts in non-Hermitian dielectric multilayers incorporated with graphene. , 2018, Optics express.

[4]  Steven J. Byrnes,et al.  Multilayer optical calculations , 2016, 1603.02720.

[5]  Vadim Smirnov,et al.  Volume-chirped Bragg gratings: monolithic components for stretching and compression of ultrashort laser pulses , 2014 .

[6]  A. Fedyanin,et al.  Giant Goos-Hänchen effect and Fano resonance at photonic crystal surfaces. , 2012, Physical review letters.

[7]  J. P. Woerdman,et al.  Observation of Goos-Hänchen shifts in metallic reflection. , 2007, Optics express.

[8]  Shi-Yao Zhu,et al.  Large negative Goos-Hänchen shift from a weakly absorbing dielectric slab. , 2005, Optics letters.

[9]  R. Chipman,et al.  Degree of polarization surfaces and maps for analysis of depolarization. , 2004, Optics express.

[10]  O. Heavens.  Thin-film Optical Filters , 1986 .

[11]  J. Goodman.  Introduction to Fourier optics , 1969 .

[12]  R. C. Thompson,et al.  Optical Waves in Layered Media , 1990 .

[13]  T. Tamir,et al.  Absorption and lateral shift of beams incident upon lossy multilayered media , 1983 .

[14]  A. Snyder,et al.  Goos-Hänchen shift. , 1976, Applied optics.

[15]  F. Goos,et al.  Ein neuer und fundamentaler Versuch zur Totalreflexion , 1947 .

[16]  David Brewster,et al.  On the Laws Which Regulate the Polarisation of Light by Reflexion from Transparent Bodies , 1815 .