CST recently published a new whitepaper about simulating special optical materials in integrated components with CST STUDIO SUITE®.
For many optical applications, materials are needed with anisotropic or nonlinear properties. Two important examples of such properties are birefringence and dichroism.
Such materials exhibit different refractive indices and attenuation for orthogonal optical polarization states. They are used to alter the polarization state of the light for example in polarizers or polarization converters. A special case of a polarization dependent material property is magneto-optical activity. Magneto-optical active materials can also be used to alter the polarization state, but more importantly they can be used to build non-reciprocal components like isolators. Further, the optical properties can not only depend on the state of polarization but also on the electric field amplitude of the light wave. The optical properties can depend on the second, third power or even higher powers of the electric field. Here, the effects and applications are vast – amplification, frequency conversion, and all-optical switching to name but a few.