Optimization of integrated polarization filters

This study reports on the design of small footprint, integrated polarization filters based on engineered photonic lattices. Using a rods-in-air lattice as a basis for a TE filter and a holes-in-slab lattice for the analogous TM filter, we are able to maximize the degree of polarization of the output beams up to 98 % with a transmission efficiency greater than 75 %. The proposed designs allow not only for logical polarization filtering, but can also be tailored to output an arbitrary transverse beam profile. The lattice configurations are found using a recently proposed parallel tabu search algorithm for combinatorial optimization problems in integrated photonics.