Disorder-enabled Synthetic Metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a disorder-engineered synthetic metasurface platform that enables multiple optical functionalities within a single device, demonstrated through a large-scale achromatic metalens and advanced polarimetric imaging.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach using engineered structural disorder to integrate multiple functions into a single metasurface, reducing size and complexity while maintaining performance.

Findings

Achromatic metalens with 11 spectral profiles and 8.1 mm aperture achieved diffraction-limited focusing.

Enabled high-resolution polarimetric imaging of complex light fields.

Demonstrated multifunctionality without increasing design complexity.

Abstract

Optical metasurfaces have catalyzed transformative advances across imaging, optoelectronics, quantum information processing, sensing, energy conversion, and optical computing. Yet, despite this rapid progress, most research remains focused on optimizing single functionalities, constrained by the persistent challenge of integrating multiple functions within a single device. Here, we demonstrate that engineered structural disorder of metapixels, used to implement a photonic function, can significantly reduce the area required across the entire aperture without compromising optical performance. The unallocated space can then be repurposed to encode functionally distinct metapixels without increasing the design complexity, each independently addressable via various optical degrees of freedom. As a proof of concept, we present a synthetic achromatic metalens featuring 11 spectrally distinct lens profiles encoded through nonlocal metapixels engineered to support sharp resonances via quasi bound states in the continuum. This large-scale metalens with 8.1 mm aperture achieves diffraction-limited achromatic focusing across the 1200 to 1400 nm spectral window. We further incorporate polarization-selective metapixels to implement momentum-space distinct gratings, enabling single-shot, high spatial resolution polarimetric imaging of arbitrarily structured light fields, including radial and azimuthal vector beams and optical skyrmions. Altogether, this disorder-enabled synthetic metasurface platform establishes a versatile foundation for unifying diverse photonic functionalities within a single optical element, marking a substantial step toward compact, high-density, multifunctional optical devices.