Transmission-Mode Silicon-Rich Nitride Mie-Void Metasurfaces in the Visible

TL;DR

This paper introduces silicon-rich nitride Mie-void metasurfaces operating in transmission mode in the visible range, enabling new optical functionalities like spectral filtering and image encoding.

Contribution

The work demonstrates the design, analysis, and experimental realization of transmission-mode Mie-void metasurfaces using SRN, expanding their application scope beyond reflection.

Findings

Transmission-mode metasurfaces exhibit hybridized Mie and Fabry-Perot resonances.

Thickness of the SRN film controls the spectral response and mode hybridization.

Experimental results show good agreement with simulations and enable color printing and image encoding.

Abstract

Mie-void metasurfaces have so far been developed mainly in reflection, where subwavelength voids embedded in high-index media support localized resonances and spectrally selective optical responses. Yet, many optical systems could benefit from integrating such optical elements operating in transmission mode. Motivated by this great need, we hereby introduce Mie-void metasurfaces operating in transmission. To allow for their operation in the visible range, our Mie-voids are implemented using the silicon-rich nitride (SRN) platform. We show that this transition from reflection to transmission is not a simple change in geometry: placing the voids in a finite film on a substrate introduces slab-guided and Fabry-Perot-like contributions that hybridize with the underlying Mie-void response. Rigorous coupled-wave analysis shows that the dominant spectral transformation occurs when the semi-infinite host is replaced by a finite SRN film, while the substrate acts mainly as a secondary perturbation. Thickness-dependent dispersion maps reveal an avoided crossing between interacting modes, supporting the interpretation of a hybrid transmission regime and identifying film thickness as a clean parameter for tracking the evolution of the coupled modal structure. Experimentally, we realize transmission-mode structural colors by varying the void depth and observe good agreement between measured and simulated spectra and chromaticity coordinates. By spatially programming the void depth, we further demonstrate transmitted-light patterns and image encoding within a single metasurface architecture. These results establish transmission-mode Mie-void metasurfaces as a viable inverse-dielectric platform operating in transmission, with plethora of potential important applications such as transmissive spectral filtering, optical encoding, and display-oriented photonic elements, to name a few.