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Spin-momentum locking of evanescent waves describes the relationship betweenthe propagation constant of an evanescent mode and the polarization of itselectromagnetic field, giving rise to applications in light nano-routing andpolarimetry among many others. The use of complex numbers in physics is apowerful representation in areas such as quantum mechanics or electromagnetism;it is well known that a lossy waveguide can be modelled with the addition of animaginary part to the propagation constant. Here we explore how these lossesare entangled with the polarization of the associated evanescent tails for thewaveguide, revealing a well-defined mapping between waveguide losses and thePoincar\'e sphere of polarizations, in what could be understood as a"polarization-loss locking" of evanescent waves. We analyse the implicationsfor near-field directional coupling of sources to waveguides, as optimizeddipoles must take into account the losses for a perfectly unidirectionalexcitation. We also reveal the potential advantage of calculating the angularspectrum of a source defined in a complex, rather than the traditionally purelyreal, transverse wavevector space formalism.

The dependence of evanescent wave polarization on the losses of guided optical modes