Experimental demonstration of ultrasharp unpolarized filtering by resonant gratings at oblique incidence

The peaks in the reflectivity spectrum of waveguide gratings observed when the incident beam couples to a mode of the structure are promising features for many applications. However their weak angular tolerance and their strong polarization sensitivity, especially under oblique incidence, limit their interest in practice. These problems can be overcome by forming slow degenerate modes outside the usual high symmetry points of the Brillouin zone with a complex periodic pattern [Fehrembach, Appl. Phys. Lett. 86, 121105 (2005)]. We show experimentally that spectrally sharp, lambda/Delta lambda approximate to 4000, polarization-independent, angularly tolerant optical resonances can be obtained by exciting these modes under oblique incidence. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America