Establishing a library of metasurface building blocks through coherence-controlled holographic microscopy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the use of coherence-controlled holographic microscopy to experimentally validate and establish a library of metasurface building blocks, accounting for real-world fabrication imperfections to improve design accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a practical holographic microscopy method to verify metasurface elements, highlighting limitations of simulations and creating a more reliable building block library.

Findings

Validation of TiO2 and Si building blocks across wavelengths and polarizations

Identification of discrepancies between simulations and experimental results

Establishment of a comprehensive, real-world metasurface library

Abstract

Digital holographic microscopy is a powerful tool for characterizing transparent and reflective phase objects. Its ability to reconstruct amplitude and phase can also offer great insight into wavefront shaping and design of all-dielectric optical metasurfaces. While metasurfaces have reached widespread popularity, their design is often based purely on the results of numerical simulations which can overlook many of the real-world fabrication imperfections. Being able to verify the real phase response of a fabricated device is of great utility for high-performance devices. Here, we use holographic microscopy to validate metalibraries of rectangular TiO2 and Si building blocks. Illumination effects are studied for wavelengths from 600 to 740 nm and linear polarization rotating within the full range of unique states (0 to 180deg). Finally, by varying the numerical aperture of the condenser lens from 0.05 to 0.5 we also study the effects of an off-axis illumination. Comparing the experimental results with simulations from finite-difference time-domain and rigorous coupled-wave analysis, we highlight the limitations of these theoretical predictions and underscore the utility of an experimentally established library of building blocks. We demonstrate that our proposed method of holographic microscopy is both practical and effective for creating a metalibrary that accounts for all fabrication and material imperfections, which is crucial for designing high-efficiency metasurfaces.