Inverse-Designed Meta-Optics with Spectral-Spatial Engineered Response to Mimic Color Perception

TL;DR

This paper presents an inverse-design method for creating single-layer meta-optics that focus light and shape its spectrum to mimic human color perception, advancing optical device design.

Contribution

It introduces a novel inverse-design approach for meta-optics that simultaneously controls spatial and spectral properties without filters, mimicking human color perception.

Findings

Meta-optics successfully focus light and shape spectra to match color perception.

Experimental results qualitatively agree with theoretical predictions.

The design enables spectral-spatial control in a single-layer device.

Abstract

Meta-optics have rapidly become a major research field within the optics and photonics community, strongly driven by the seemingly limitless opportunities made possible by controlling optical wavefronts through interaction with arrays of sub-wavelength scatterers. As more and more modalities are explored, the design strategies to achieve desired functionalities become increasingly demanding, necessitating more advanced design techniques. Herein, the inverse-design approach is utilized to create a set of single-layer meta-optics that simultaneously focus light and shape the spectra of focused light without using any filters. Thus, both spatial and spectral properties of the meta-optics are optimized, resulting in spectra that mimic the color matching functions of the CIE 1931 XYZ color space, which links the distributions of wavelengths in light and the color perception of a human eye. Experimental demonstrations of these meta-optics show qualitative agreement with the theoretical predictions and help elucidate the focusing mechanism of these devices.