title: Rigorous analysis of shadowing effects in blazed transmission gratings.
abstract: Blazed transmission gratings have become crucial components in many hybrid optical systems. Shadowing effects are known to occur at their passive blaze facets, which may impair the system's efficiency performance. For optical designs, it is desirable to have a simple but accurate description of this phenomenon. We show that the efficiency reduction in low diffraction orders is dominated by a linear dependence on the ratio of wavelength to grating period rather than a quadratic dependence as proposed in extended scalar theory. The strength of the electromagnetic shadowing will be determined using rigorous diffraction methods and discussed with respect to imaging optical components. Results are compared to existing ray-optical models.
authors.affiliation: Microstructured Optics, Corporate Research and Technology, Carl Zeiss AG, Jena, Germany. Sandfuchs@zeiss.de
authors.forename: Oliver
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Sandfuchs
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Brunner
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pätz
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sinzinger
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ruoff