A commercially available wire grid plate polarizer (Meadowlark IR VersaLight) is experimentally characterized for use as a polarizing beam splitter with variable incidence angles up to ± 50°. Five elements of this type are tested, and found to have an average pass-state transmittance of approximately 94% ± 2% for incidence angles up to ±30° and a block-state reflectance of approximately 92% ± 2% for all measured incidence angles. Polarizer orientation (with compensating adjustment of input linear polarization state) and propagation direction through the device were each found to cause no more than a 2% difference of transmission/reflection efficiency for incidence angles up to ±30°. Overall, this device was found to demonstrate high efficiency in both pass state transmittance and block state reflectance over a range of incidence angles and polarizer orientations, confirming its usability as a versatile polarizing beam splitter.

A novel transmissive-reflective beam scanner operating around 1550 nm wavelength has been demonstrated using two commercial wire grid polarizers (WGPs) with transmission axes offset by 45°, surrounding a latching garnet 45° Faraday rotator. Light in the system undergoes three 45° polarization rotations, resulting in two reflections inside the cavity between the two WGPs before being transmitted by the rear WGP. The two reflections inside the device facilitate beam steering in a transmissive layout (output beam emerging from the opposite side of the input beam). Polarization-resolved individual-component characterizations were performed for several WGPs and for the Faraday rotator to determine optical properties such as transmission efficiency and the polarization purity of the transmitted or reflected beams as a function of incidence angle to the optic, for multiple incident linear polarization states. This allowed us to both select the WGPs best suited to act as polarizing beam splitters in the system and to use the angle-resolved component data to predict the total transmission efficiency of the beam scanner as a function of front polarizer tilt angle (which in our geometry is half of the beam deflection angle). We then compared the predicted scanner efficiency with the measured transmission efficiency of the prototype beam scanner. The scanner maintained a transmission efficiency over 70% for beam deflection angles between ±45° (a 90° symmetric beam scan area) for a vertically oriented incident linear polarization state.