Inverse design enables large-scale high-performance meta-optics reshaping virtual reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable inverse design framework for large-scale, high-performance 3D meta-optics, enabling practical fabrication and application in virtual reality devices with improved optical functionalities.

Contribution

The authors develop a general inverse design method for large-scale 3D meta-optics that reduces computational costs and incorporates fabrication constraints, demonstrated with visible aberration-corrected metalenses.

Findings

Successfully designed large-scale visible metalenses with high numerical aperture.

Achieved poly-chromatic focusing and centimeter-scale device size.

Demonstrated potential for virtual reality applications with a meta-eyepiece.

Abstract

Meta-optics has achieved major breakthroughs in the past decade; however, conventional forward design faces challenges as functionality complexity and device size scale up. Inverse design aims at optimizing meta-optics design but has been currently limited by expensive brute-force numerical solvers to small devices, which are also difficult to realize experimentally. Here, we present a general inverse design framework for aperiodic large-scale complex meta-optics in three dimensions, which alleviates computational cost for both simulation and optimization via a fast-approximate solver and an adjoint method, respectively. Our framework naturally accounts for fabrication constraints via a surrogate model. In experiments, we demonstrate, for the first time, aberration-corrected metalenses working in the visible with high numerical aperture, poly-chromatic focusing, and large diameter up to centimeter scale. Such large-scale meta-optics opens a new paradigm for applications, and we demonstrate its potential for future virtual-reality platforms by using a meta-eyepiece and a laser back-illuminated micro-Liquid Crystal Display.