1.

Literature review on Polarization papers:

I went through the selected papers during the past week. I only chose 4 of those papers to continue with,
since the other 7 papers were either unrelated to our purpose or did not have any potential implications for
our research. Regardless of that, a brief summary of all the papers have been prepared as follows:
In an earlier paper by (Bertilone, 1994), a scattering matrix approach have been employed to find the stokes
parameters and degree of polarization of the electric field emitted either by a large, smooth, and opaque
body or small subwavelength particle in the far-field region. In both cases, the polarization of the field is
characterized by using approximation to the absorption cross-sections of the field and then employing those
cross-sections to calculate the Stokes parameters. This paper is an extension of the method used in the
famous book by Born and Wolf and deals only with 2-D definition of polarization. This approach is only
for far-field emission and it would result in zero degree of polarization for the case of a sphere; also, it does
not provide any implications for our study.
In the next work by (Hasman et al., 2005), the manipulation of polarization from SiO2 (which supports
SPPs) using a subwavelength grating pattern has been studied. For the theoretical design of the grating
pattern, a spectral reflectance calculation has been performed using the rigorous coupled wave analysis.
Then, using Kirchhoff’s law for opaque bodies, one can easily calculate the emissivity of the surface for
either TE or TM polarization states. It has been shown theoretically and experimentally that thermal infrared
radiation could be enhanced with the excitation of SPPs. This enhancement is observed only when the
sample has been illuminated by the TM polarized waves, which shows the polarization dependency of
thermal emission. (since emissivity and reflectivity are related to each other by Kirchhoff’s law) The only
implication of this work for our research is the potential of SiO2 for having narrow-band spectral
polarization in the near-field.
In the next set of papers written by (Dogariu and Boreman, 1996; Marquier et al., 2008; Ginn et al., 2010;
Wadsworth et al., 2011)the same method used by (Bertilone, 1994) has been employed to either design
layered materials with specific polarization type for thermal emission or exploring the effect of surface
roughness on the type of polarization. As it was mentioned earlier, this method only accounts for 2-D
polarization and is not related to our research.
(Blomstedt et al., 2013) have studied the polarization of blackbody radiation in the far-field region from an
aperture. This has been done by propagating the specified field at the aperture to the far-field in the terms
of Rayleigh diffraction formula to find the electric field and spectral density matrix and therefore is not
related to our research.
To this point all the papers that were summarized do not have potential implications for our research. The
following 4 papers are the most relevant ones. The first paper by (Machida, Narimanov and Schotland,
2016) deals with the polarization oscillations of thermal emission in the nearfield. Nearfield effect of
polarization of EM waves was considered earlier by people who worked in the field of Optics. However,
developed formulas and concepts had a general purpose and no special attention was considered for
nearfield effects of thermal emission. Starting from 2002, Setala has published a series of papers on this
topic (Setälä et al., 2002; Setälä, Kaivola and Friberg, 2002) and proposed a framework for characterization
of this phenomenon. First, they extend the polarization concepts in 2-D to 3-D by terms of Gell-Mann basis
matrices and then they explore the invariant 3-D degree of polarization from the coherency matrix (or
spectral density matrix). Before this work, thermal emission was considered to have an unpolarized field
because of its zero value for 2-D degree of polarization. However, they prove that a fully unpolarized 2-D
planar field cannot be fully unpolarized in the 3-D formalism. As we know, in the 2-D formalism only two
directions for field components are being considered and the third direction does not show up, therefore it
is not a proper method to fully characterize arbitrary field caused by thermal emission that could have three
components.
It is well-established in the literature that thermal emission in the nearfield regime is dominated mostly by
the presence of evanescent waves. Fluctuation-dissipation theorem is being used widely to account for this
effect and also for the purpose of finding surface current (and consequently electric field) in the nearfield
regime and one of the consequences of this theorem is the randomness of emitted evanescent fields in all
directions.
Using the 3-D formalism, degree of polarization for thermal emission from a half-space source have been
studied by (Setälä, Kaivola and Friberg, 2002). It has been shown that thermal emission could be highly
polarized in the nearfield regime and as we progress towards far-field, this quantity decreases and the waves
become totally unpolarized in the far-field. The results of this study have been plotted as follows:

Figure.1 (second figure in the right is the magnification of left figure)

As we can see from the figures above, the general behavior of polarization degree is similar for all the
materials and it reaches a maximum level first and then it reduces gradually. Similar to this study, in 2009
(Yannopapas and Vitanov, 2009) has studied the degree of polarization in the nearfield of arrays of metallic
spheres and they also, have reported a similar result for the behavior of polarization for different sphere
size and numbers.
On the other hand, in 2016 (Machida, Narimanov and Schotland, 2016) has reported a set of different data
for the same problem considered by (Setälä, Kaivola and Friberg, 2002). They showed that the decay in the
degree of polarization is not monotonic and it shows as oscillatory behavior. The result is as below:
Figure.2
This difference could be the result of different formalism of the problem, so it is worth to take a lok at what
method they have used for their simulation. In the first paper by (Setälä, Kaivola and Friberg, 2002), first,
they find the electric field using:

And then the spectral density matrix could be formed by:

In the method proposed by (Machida, Narimanov and Schotland, 2016), using fluctuation-dissipation
theorem, the cross-spectral density matrix is related to the Green’s tensor by:

The conflict between the result of these two works is really interesting and I think it is worth to explore the
polarization degree for thermal emission from the sphere (different materials and regimes and spectrum)
using the spectral density matrix method of Saman and your paper and see the result for our formalism.
In the next paper which is about the degree of polarization of thermal emission by a spherical source
(Yannopapas, 2010), the author studies the effect of material spatial dispersion on the spectra of the degree
of polarization. It has been found that a non-local dielectric function would cause blue shift in the spectra
of degree of polarization. Although one of the main assumptions of the method used by Saman is that the
sphere consists of a non-dispersive material , but still this research has some implications that could be used
in our research. For example, they have acquired the spectral degree of polarization for different sizes and
we could employ the same representation in the future to show the general behavior of polarization. Second,
from the figure below:
Figure. 3
We can see that for a specific radial frequency, the degree of polarization shows oscillatory behavior with
respect to the size of the sphere.
In the last paper by (Khandekar and Jacob, 2019), the author introduces a new quantity for characterizing
the thermal emission polarization called the spin angular momentum density (S) which its definition is as
follows:

Using those definitions, a dimensionless quantity (called spectral thermal spin) is defined as:

This quantity lies between -1 and 1 and is a measure of circular polarization of the field lying transverse to
a given propagation direction. This definition has been proposed very recently and I need to do more
research about it in the future to see if it can have any implications for our research or not.

2. Result of Scuff
Two more case were investigated for this week. For the first case, as it was instructed, the data was
generated for an array of nanopillars with 3um height, straight tip, and no trench pattern. (case11) The result
was compared to the same geometry with trench pattern. (case10) the result is very strange and it does not
follow the pattern we saw previously:
Figure. 4
As we can see the extra peak between 850 and 900cm-1 which showed up in previous cases pattern and
was addressed as the result of trench pattern shows up here again, although case11 does not have any trench.
For the next case, an array of nanowires with 1um height, flat tip, and no substrate was simulated. (case12)
This result was compared to case 3, where we have the same geometry with substrate. The result is as
follows:

Figure. 5
As we can see, the peak between 850 and 900cm-1 showed up again, and since we do not have any substrate
for case 12 there is no peak showing up between 800 and 850cm-1.

3. Schematic for far-field emissivity measurement

4. Future Plan
For the next week, I will mostly focus on the experimental setup configuration, since we are going to start
making the setup soon. Also, I will try to complete the literature review on polarization and see if I can find
more relevant papers that could have implications and suggestion for our research.

References
Bertilone, D. C. (1994) ‘Stokes parameters and partial polarization of far-field radiation emitted by hot
bodies’, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A. OSA, 11(8), pp. 2298–2304. doi: 10.1364/JOSAA.11.002298.
Blomstedt, K. et al. (2013) ‘Partial polarization and electromagnetic spatial coherence of blackbody
radiation emanating from an aperture’, Phys. Rev. A. American Physical Society, 88(1), p. 13824. doi:
10.1103/PhysRevA.88.013824.
Dogariu, A. C. and Boreman, G. D. (1996) ‘Rough-surface polarization effects of infrared emission’, in
Dainty, C. and Bissonnette, L. R. (eds) Image Propagation through the Atmosphere. SPIE, pp. 162–170.
doi: 10.1117/12.254162.
Ginn, J. et al. (2010) ‘Polarized infrared emission using frequency selective surfaces’, Opt. Express.
OSA, 18(5), pp. 4557–4563. doi: 10.1364/OE.18.004557.
Hasman, E. et al. (2005) ‘Space-Variant Polarization Manipulation of a Thermal Emission by a SiO2
Subwavelength Grating Supporting Surface Phonon-Polariton’, in Conference on Lasers and Electro-
Optics/Quantum Electronics and Laser Science and Photonic Applications Systems Technologies. Optical
Society of America, p. CTuL6. Available at: http://www.osapublishing.org/abstract.cfm?URI=CLEO-
2005-CTuL6.
Khandekar, C. and Jacob, Z. (2019) ‘Circularly Polarized Thermal Radiation From Nonequilibrium
Coupled Antennas’, Phys. Rev. Applied. American Physical Society, 12(1), p. 14053. doi:
10.1103/PhysRevApplied.12.014053.
Machida, M., Narimanov, E. and Schotland, J. C. (2016) ‘Polarization oscillations of near-field thermal
emission’, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A. OSA, 33(6), pp. 1071–1075. doi: 10.1364/JOSAA.33.001071.
Marquier, F. et al. (2008) ‘Degree of polarization of thermal light emitted by gratings supporting surface
waves’, Opt. Express. OSA, 16(8), pp. 5305–5313. doi: 10.1364/OE.16.005305.
Setälä, T. et al. (2002) ‘Degree of polarization for optical near fields’, Phys. Rev. E. American Physical
Society, 66(1), p. 16615. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.66.016615.
Setälä, T., Kaivola, M. and Friberg, A. T. (2002) ‘Degree of Polarization in Near Fields of Thermal
Sources: Effects of Surface Waves’, Phys. Rev. Lett. American Physical Society, 88(12), p. 123902. doi:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.123902.
Wadsworth, S. L. et al. (2011) ‘Broadband circularly-polarized infrared emission from multilayer
metamaterials’, Opt. Mater. Express. OSA, 1(3), pp. 466–479. doi: 10.1364/OME.1.000466.
Yannopapas, V. (2010) ‘Effect of material spatial dispersion in the degree of polarization of thermal
radiation emitted by a spherical source’, Optics Communications, 283(22), pp. 4494–4498. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.optcom.2010.04.079.
Yannopapas, V. and Vitanov, N. V (2009) ‘Degree of polarization of the thermal near field generated by
arrays of metallic nanoparticles’, Phys. Rev. B. American Physical Society, 80(3), p. 35410. doi:
10.1103/PhysRevB.80.035410.