On the concept of a generalized law of refraction: A phenomenological model The Article and the Supporting Informations

TL;DR

This paper develops a phenomenological model to accurately describe the generalized laws of refraction and reflection for metasurfaces, revealing that these laws must be modified for diffractive elements and depend on the metasurface properties.

Contribution

It introduces a new phenomenological model that modifies the generalized laws of refraction and reflection for diffractive metasurfaces, applicable to both periodic and non-periodic structures.

Findings

Generalized laws need modification for diffractive metasurfaces

Strict validity of laws for linear and sawtooth phase profiles

Approximate laws for non-linear phase profiles

Abstract

This paper presents investigations on the generalized laws of refraction and reflection for metasurfaces made of diffractive elements. It introduces a phenomenological model that reproduces all the features of the experiments dedicated to the generalized Snell-Descartes laws. Our main finding is that the generalized laws of refrac-tion and reflection as previously stated have to be modified in order to describe the propagation of light through metasurfaces made of diffractive elements. We provide the appropriate laws that take a different form depending on the properties of the metasurface. Our models apply to both periodic and non-periodic metasurfaces. We show that the generalized law of refraction strictly exists only for linear-phase profiles and sawtooth-wave phase profiles under constraints that we specify. It can be approximatively defined for non-linear phase profiles. This document includes the article as the part I and the supporting informations as the part II.