Ultrawide-angle diffraction-limited 2D beam steering via hybrid integrated metasurface-photonic circuit

TL;DR

This paper presents a compact chip-scale platform combining silicon photonics and metasurfaces for ultrawide-angle, diffraction-limited 2D beam steering with a field of view exceeding 160 degrees, suitable for space and optical communication applications.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a hybrid integrated system achieving ultrawide-angle, diffraction-limited 2D beam steering with a compact design, advancing integrated optical beam control technology.

Findings

Achieved a field of view exceeding 160 degrees.

Maintained diffraction-limited beam quality over a broad angular range.

Provided a scalable approach for high-fidelity 2D beam steering.

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) wide field-of-view (FOV) beam steering is a key enabling capability for emerging free-space optical systems, including inter-satellite optical links, airborne LiDAR, point-to-point optical wireless communications, and collaborative robotic platforms. These applications require rapid acquisition and tracking across both azimuth and elevation; architectures that offer wide scanning in only one dimension while maintaining limited coverage in the orthogonal direction constrain link availability, coverage uniformity, and system agility. Here, we demonstrate a chip-scale platform for ultrawide-angle, diffraction-limited 2D beam steering based on hybrid integration of a silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and an optical metasurface. A free-form micro-optical reflector efficiently transforms the guided waveguide mode into an expanded free-space beam that illuminates an analytically optimized ultrawide-FOV metasurface. The integrated system achieves a measured FOV exceeding 160{\deg} while maintaining diffraction-limited beam quality over a broad angular range at telecom wavelengths. This hybrid PIC-metasurface architecture provides a compact and scalable route to high-quality 2D beam steering and establishes a practical pathway toward integrated optical projectors for space-based optical communications and other applications requiring agile, wide-angle, high-fidelity beam control.