Metasurface integrated Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers for programmable directional lasing emissions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the integration of dielectric metasurfaces with VCSELs to achieve programmable, arbitrary laser beam shaping with high efficiency, enabling advanced applications in communications, sensing, and display technologies.

Contribution

The study introduces a monolithic integration method of dielectric metasurfaces with VCSELs for customizable beam profiles, simplifying fabrication and maintaining high laser performance.

Findings

Achieved arbitrary beam shaping including self-collimation, Bessel, and Vortex modes.

Demonstrated high efficiency and wafer-level integration of metasurfaces with VCSELs.

Enabled potential applications in optical communications, sensing, and display devices.

Abstract

Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) have made indispensable contributions to the development of modern optoelectronic technologies. However, arbitrary beam shaping of VCSELs within a compact system still remains inaccessible till now. The emerging ultra-thin flat optical structures, namely metasurfaces, offer a powerful technique to manipulate electromagnetic fields with subwavelength spatial resolution. Here, we show that the monolithic integration of dielectric metasurfaces with VCSELs enables remarkable arbitrary control of the laser beam profiles, including self-collimation, Bessel and Vortex lasers, with high efficiency. Such wafer-level integration of metasurface through VCSELs-compatible technology simplifies the assembling process and preserves the high performance of the VCSELs. We envision that our approach can be implemented in various wide-field applications, such as optical fibre communications, laser printing, smartphones, optical sensing, face recognition, directional displays and ultra-compact light detection and ranging (LiDAR).