Space-variant polarization manipulation of a thermal emission by a SiO2 subwavelength grating supporting surface phonon-polaritons

Space-variant polarization manipulation of enhanced nondirectional thermal emission in a narrow spectral peak is presented. The emission is attributed to surface phonon-polariton excitation from space-variant subwavelength SiO2 gratings. Polarization manipulation was obtained by discretely controlling the local orientation of the grating. We experimentally demonstrated thermal emission in an axially symmetric polarization distribution. Theoretical calculations based on rigorous coupled-wave analysis are presented along with experimental results.