A rigorous coupled-wave analysis of birefringent holographic gratings with periodically-modulated dielectric tensor along an in-plane direction and tensor variations in the thickness direction

Diffraction of light upon interaction with thick slabs of a dielectric material having a periodic modulation of its refractive index (or dielectric tensor) is typically studied with the aid of the method known as the rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA). The method involves solving Maxwell’s equations for a large number of coupled electromagnetic plane-waves inside the dielectric slab, then matching the boundary conditions at the interface between the incidence medium and the slab, as well as those at the interface between the slab and the transmittance medium. In this way, one obtains the E-field and H-field amplitudes for all the reflected and transmitted plane-waves (i.e., diffraction orders as well as evanescent waves) that emerge within the incidence and transmittance media. If the refractive index (or dielectric tensor) of the holographic slab happens to vary in the thickness direction, one treats the slab as a number of thin layers stacked upon each other, then computes and combines the scattering matrices of these layers to arrive at the complete solution for the entire stack. The goal of the present paper is to extend the standard RCWA method to the case where the hologram’s dielectric tensor varies in the thickness direction (in addition to being periodically modulated along an in-plane axis), without slicing up the thick hologram into a number of thin layers. The reflected and transmitted plane-waves in this case exhibit a large degree of degeneracy, but our numerical results confirm the validity and the accuracy of our proposed algorithm for handling such degeneracies.