High efficient metasurface quarter-wave plate with wavefront engineering

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly efficient metasurface quarter-wave plate that combines geometric and propagation phase control to achieve advanced wavefront engineering and polarization conversion, enabling versatile optical device functionalities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel metasurface design that integrates phase and polarization control for efficient wavefront and polarization manipulation.

Findings

Achieved high conversion efficiency of spin light to linearly polarized light.

Demonstrated applications in meta-holograms, metalens focusing, and imaging.

Realized a compact, multifunctional optical device with enhanced performance.

Abstract

Metasurfaces with local phase tuning by subwavelength elements promise unprecedented possibilities for ultra-thin and multifunctional optical devices, in which geometric phase design is widely used due to its resonant-free and large tolerance in fabrications. By arranging the orientations of anisotropic nano-antennas, the geometric phase-based metasurfaces can convert the incident spin light to its orthogonal state, and enable flexible wavefront engineering together with the function of a half-wave plate. Here, by incorporating the propagation phase, we realize another important optical device of quarter-wave plate together with the wavefront engineering as well, which is implemented by controlling both the cross- and co-polarized light simultaneously with a singlet metasurface. Highly efficient conversion of the spin light to a variety of linearly polarized light are obtained for meta-holograms, metalens focusing and imaging in blue light region. Our work provides a new strategy for efficient metasurfaces with both phase and polarization control, and enriches the functionalities of metasurface devices for wider application scenarios.