Electrically Tunable Reflective Metasurfaces with Continuous and Full Phase Modulation for High-efficiency Wavefront Control at Visible Frequencies

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-efficiency, electrically tunable reflective metasurface using liquid crystal layers for continuous phase modulation at visible frequencies, enabling dynamic wavefront control and beam steering.

Contribution

Introduction of a liquid crystal-based tunable metasurface with 2pi phase control, small pixel size, and high diffraction efficiency for dynamic optical applications.

Findings

Achieved continuous 2pi phase tuning in visible frequencies.

Demonstrated dynamic beam steering with high efficiency.

Enabled high-resolution, pixel-addressable wavefront modulation.

Abstract

All-dielectric optical metasurfaces can locally control the amplitude and phase of light at the nanoscale, enabling arbitrary wavefront shaping. However, lack of post-fabrication tunability has limited the true potential of metasurfaces for many applications. Here, we utilize a thin liquid crystal (LC) layer as a tunable medium surrounding the metasurface to achieve a phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM) with high reflection in the visible frequency, exhibiting an active and continuous resonance tuning with associated 2pi phase control and uncoupled amplitude. Dynamic wavefront shaping is demonstrated by programming 96 individually addressable electrodes with a small pixel pitch of ~1 um. The small pixel size is facilitated by the reduced LC thickness, strongly suppressing crosstalk among pixels. This device is used to demonstrate dynamic beam steering with wide field-of-view and high absolute diffraction efficiencies. We believe that our demonstration may pave the way towards realizing next generation, high-resolution SLMs, with wide applications in dynamic holography, tunable optics and light detection and ranging (LiDAR), to mention a few.