Bifunctional Luneburg-fisheye Lens Based on the Manipulation of Spoof Surface Plasmons

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bifunctional Luneburg-fisheye lens based on spoof surface plasmons, capable of subwavelength focusing and imaging, with potential applications across microwaves, terahertz, and optical frequencies.

Contribution

It presents a novel metal pillar array design enabling a single lens to perform dual functionalities by manipulating SSPs along orthogonal directions.

Findings

Achieves subwavelength focusing with 0.14 wavelength resolution.

Demonstrates bifunctionality with Luneburg and Maxwell fisheye properties.

Experimental results closely match simulations.

Abstract

Manipulation of spoof surface plasmons (SSPs) has recently intrigued enormous interest due to the capability of guiding waves with subwavelength footsteps. However, most of the previous studies, manifested for a single functionality, are not suitable for multifunctional integrated devices. Herein, a bifunctional Luneburg-fisheye lens is proposed based on a two-dimension metal pillar array. Firstly, by tuning the geometric dimension of the metal pillars in the array, its ability to precisely manipulate the excited SSPs along one direction is confirmed, achieving subwavelength focusing and imaging with the resolution up to 0.14 times the wavelength. Then, separately controlling the propagation of the SSPs along the orthotropic directions is further implemented, and the bifunctional Luneburg-fisheye lens is realized. The bifunctional lens is characterized as a Luneburg one along the x-axis, whereas in the y-axis, it presents the properties of a Maxwell fisheye lens. The experimental results almost immaculately match with the simulation ones. This bifunctional lens can validly reduce the system complexity and exert flexibility in multifunctional applications, while the proposed metal pillar-based design method broadens the application range of gradient refractive-index lens in the microwaves, terahertz, and even optical ranges.