Polarization independent lensing and superbeaming in plasmonic crystals and applications to focal plane arrays

Numerous novel and useful optical phenomena have been observed in perforated metal films and other related structures. These structures range from simple two dimensional hole arrays and lamellar gratings to compound gratings, crossed gratings, and more complicated hole array structures with more than one aperture per repeating unit cell. The interesting optical effects observed in these structures include anomalous transmission, absorption and reflection, superbeaming and lensing, light circulation and weaving, and light concentration and trapping. Applications of these structures and optical phenomena include high bandwidth and efficient photodetectors, high brightness LEDs, super lenses, novel polarizers, chemical and biological sensors and high performance solar cells. This work focuses on a topic generally overlooked in research on plasmonic crystals but that greatly limits the range of applications in which these structures can be used as well as the performance enhancements in the applications for which they are currently being used; this topic is the polarization behavior of all of the aforementioned optical effects of plasmonic crystals.