Reconfigurable all-dielectric metalens with diffraction-limited performance

Abstract

Active metasurfaces, whose optical properties can be modulated post-fabrication, have emerged as an intensively explored field in recent years. The efforts to date, however, still face major performance limitations in tuning range, optical quality, and efficiency, especially for non-mechanical actuation mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce an active metasurface platform combining phase tuning in the full 2π range and diffraction-limited performance using an all-dielectric, low-loss architecture based on optical phase change materials (O-PCMs). We present a generic design principle enabling binary switching of metasurfaces between arbitrary phase profiles and propose a new figure-of-merit (FOM) tailored for reconfigurable meta-optics. We implement the approach to realize a high-performance varifocal metalens operating at 5.2 μm wavelength. The reconfigurable metalens features a record large switching contrast ratio of 29.5 dB. We further validate aberration-free and multi-depth imaging using the metalens, which represents a key experimental demonstration of a non-mechanical tunable metalens with diffraction-limited performance.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Feb 22, 2021
Source ID
10.1038/s41467-021-21440-9

Entities

People

  • Anu Agarwal
  • Carlos Ríos
  • Christopher Roberts
  • Clara Rivero-baleine
  • Clayton Fowler
  • Fan Yang
  • Hualiang Zhang
  • Jeffrey B. Chou
  • Juejun Hu
  • Kathleen A. Richardson
  • Mikhail Y Shalaginov
  • Myungkoo Kang
  • Peter Su
  • Qingyang Du
  • Sensong An
  • Tian Gu
  • Vladimir Liberman
  • Yifei Zhang

Organizations

  • United States Department of Defense

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Nanofabrication and Microfabrication.
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.