Simultaneous achromatic and varifocal imaging with quartic metasurfaces in the visible

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel hybrid optical-digital system with conjugate metasurfaces that achieve simultaneous achromatic and varifocal imaging across the visible spectrum, enabling compact, high-performance imaging without size constraints.

Contribution

The authors introduce a polarization-insensitive, hybrid metasurface system that achieves large-area, broadband achromatic and varifocal imaging through phase engineering and post-processing, overcoming fabrication limitations.

Findings

Achieved a 4.8 mm tunable focal length with 667-diopter change.

Maintained a near spectrally invariant point spread function across visible wavelengths.

Demonstrated full-color, incoherent white light imaging with 5x zoom range.

Abstract

Two key metrics for imaging systems are their magnification and optical bandwidth. While high-quality imaging systems today achieve bandwidths spanning the whole visible spectrum and large changes in magnification via optical zoom, these often entail lens assemblies with bulky elements unfit for size-constrained applications. Metalenses present a methodology for miniaturization but their strong chromatic aberrations and the lack of a varifocal achromatic element limit their utility. While exemplary broadband achromatic metalenses are realizable via dispersion engineering, in practice, these designs are limited to small physical apertures as large area lenses would require phase compensating scatterers with aspect ratios infeasible for fabrication. Many applications, however, necessitate larger areas to collect more photons for better signal-to-noise ratio and furthermore must also operate with unpolarized light. In this paper, we simultaneously achieve achromatic operation at visible wavelengths and varifocal control using a polarization-insensitive, hybrid optical-digital system with area unconstrained by dispersion-engineered scatterers. We derive phase equations for a pair of conjugate metasurfaces that generate a focused accelerating beam for chromatic focal shift control and a wide tunable focal length range of 4.8 mm (a 667-diopter change). Utilizing this conjugate pair, we realize a near spectrally invariant point spread function across the visible regime. We then combine the metasurfaces with a post-capture deconvolution algorithm to image full-color patterns under incoherent white light, demonstrating an achromatic 5x zoom range. Simultaneously achromatic and varifocal metalenses could have applications in various fields including augmented reality, implantable microscopes, and machine vision sensors.