Waveguiding in blazed-binary diffractive elements

Recent experimental and numerical results clearly show that blazed-binary diffractive elements outperform their standard blazed-échelette counterparts in the resonance domain. A theoretical study of one-dimensional blazed-binary gratings shows that the reason for this high efficiency is a waveguiding effect. The electromagnetic study supports the idea that, through waveguiding, a reduction of the shadowing zone is achieved, and thus the efficiency is increased. This is intrinsic to high-frequency binary structures and cannot be achieved with standard échelette diffractive elements.