Dielectric Metasurfaces for Complete Control of Phase and Polarization with Subwavelength Spatial Resolution and High Transmission

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dielectric metasurface platform that achieves full control over light's phase and polarization with high efficiency and subwavelength resolution, enabling versatile flat optical components.

Contribution

The authors develop a high-contrast dielectric elliptical nano-post metasurface that provides complete polarization and phase control with high transmission efficiency.

Findings

Achieved transmission efficiencies from 72% to 97%.

Demonstrated various optical elements like lenses, polarizers, and holograms.

Enabled polarization switchable and arbitrary vector beam generation.

Abstract

Metasurfaces are planar structures that locally modify the polarization, phase, and amplitude of light in reflection or transmission, thus enabling lithographically patterned flat optical components with functionalities controlled by design. Transmissive metasurfaces are especially important, as most optical systems used in practice operate in transmission. Several types of transmissive metasurfaces have been realized, but with either low transmission efficiencies or limited control over polarization and phase. Here we show a metasurface platform based on high-contrast dielectric elliptical nano-posts which provides complete control of polarization and phase with sub-wavelength spatial resolution and experimentally measured efficiency ranging from 72% to 97%, depending on the exact design. Such complete control enables the realization of most free-space transmissive optical elements such as lenses, phase-plates, wave-plates, polarizers, beam-splitters, as well as polarization switchable phase holograms and arbitrary vector beam generators using the same metamaterial platform.