Artificial birefringent metallic planar structures for terahertz wave polarization manipulation

We propose an artificial birefringent terahertz (THz) device constructed by subwavelength L-shaped hole arrays on a single metallic layer. This structure is able to work as a polarizer when the incident frequency is between the cut-off frequencies of two eigenmodes. When the incident wave is beyond cut-off frequencies of these two modes, it can be designed as an efficient half- or quarter-wave plate with extraordinary transmission properties. A big effective index difference from 0.254 to 0.768 is obtained using a subwavelength-thick planar structure, which can reduce the thickness of the device to one tenth of conventional quartz birefringent crystals for THz waves.