Spatial differentiation and integration of optical beams in a slab waveguide by a single dielectric ridge
We show that a very simple structure consisting of a single subwavelength dielectric ridge on the surface of a slab waveguide enables spatial differentiation and integration of the profile of optical beams propagating in the waveguide. The differentiation and integration operations are performed in transmission and in reflection, respectively, at oblique incidence of the beam impinging on the ridge. The implementation of these operations is associated with the resonant excitation of a cross-polarized eigenmode of the ridge. At the considered parameters of the structure and incidence geometry, neither "parasitic" out-of-plane scattering nor polarization conversion occurs. The presented rigorous numerical simulation results confirm high-quality differentiation and integration. We demonstrate that by choosing the quality factor of the resonance, one can achieve the required tradeoff between the differentiation (or integration) quality and the amplitude of the resulting beam. The proposed integrated structure may find application in ultrafast all-optical analog computing and signal processing systems.