Broadband optical isolator in fibre optics

Abstract

We propose a broadband optical diode, which is composed of one achromatic reciprocal quarter-wave plate and one non-reciprocal quarter-wave plate, both placed between two crossed polarizers. The presented design of achromatic wave plates relies on an adiabatic evolution of the Stokes vector, thus, the scheme is robust and efficient. The possible simple implementation using fiber optics is suggested.