Polarization tomography of metallic nanohole arrays

We report polarization tomography experiments on metallic nanohole arrays with square and hexagonal symmetry. As a main result we find that a fully polarized input beam is partly depolarized after transmission through a nanohole array. This loss of polarization coherence is found to be anisotropic; i.e., it depends on the polarization state of the input beam. The depolarization. is ascribed to a combination of two factors: W the nonlocal response of the array as a result of surface-plasmon propagation and (ii) the non-plane-wave nature of a practical input beam. (C) 2005 Optical Society of America.