Design of a grating-based thin-film filter for broadband spectropolarimetry

We propose a simple procedure for designing an integrated single-chip grating-based thin-film filter. A simulation from a rigorous coupled-wave analysis shows that structural adjustment based on the effective medium theory can achieve the desired integration without notable performance degradation. Our spectropolarimetric filter design maintains spectral filter characteristics, while its extinction ratio is significantly enhanced over the passband. The integrated spectropolarimetric filter can be a basis for building multispectral multipolarimetric filters for spectropolarimetry in remote-sensing applications. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.