Dependence of evanescent wave polarization on the losses of guided optical modes

Spin-momentum locking of evanescent waves describes the relationship between the propagation constant of an evanescent mode and the polarization of its electromagnetic field, giving rise to applications in light nanorouting and polarimetry among many others. The use of complex numbers in physics is a powerful representation in areas, such as quantum mechanics or electromagnetism; it is well known that a lossy waveguide can be modeled with the addition of an imaginary part to the propagation constant. Here we explore how these losses are entangled with the polarization of the associated evanescent tails for the waveguide, revealing a well-defined mapping between waveguide losses and the Poincaré sphere of polarizations in what could be understood as a “polarization-loss locking” of evanescent waves. We analyze the implications for near-field directional coupling of sources to waveguides as optimized dipoles must take into account the losses for a perfectly unidirectional excitation. We also reveal the potential advantage of calculating the angular spectrum of a source defined in a complex rather than the traditionally purely real transverse wave-vector space formalism.