Increasing attention is being paid to chiral metasurfaces due to their ability to selectively manipulate right-hand circularly polarized light or left-hand circularly polarized light. The thin nature of metasurfaces, however, poses a challenge in creating a device with effective phase modulation. Plasmonic chiral metasurfaces have attempted to address this issue by increasing light-matter interaction, but they suffer from metallic loss. Dielectric metasurfaces made from high index materials enable phase modulation while being thin. Very few materials, however, have high refractive index and low loss at visible wavelengths. Recently, some 2D materials have been shown to exhibit high refractive index and low loss in the visible wavelengths, positioning them as promising platform for meta-optics. This study introduces and details a planar chiral metasurface with geometric phase composed of WS2 meta-units. By employing adjoint optimization techniques, we achieved broadband circular dichroism.
The solid immersion lens is a powerful optical tool that allows light entering material from air or vacuum to focus to a spot much smaller than the free-space wavelength. Conventionally, however, they rely on semispherical topographies and are non-planar and bulky, which limits their integration in many applications. Recently, there has been considerable interest in using planar structures, referred to as metasurfaces, to construct flat optical components for manipulating light in unusual ways. Here, we propose and demonstrate the concept of a planar immersion lens based on metasurfaces. The r…
Optical metasurfaces with high-Q chiral resonances can boost light-matter interaction for various applications of chiral response for ultrathin, active, and nonlinear metadevices. Usually, such metasurfaces require sophisticated depth-resolved nanofabrication to realize subwavelength stereo-nanostructures, posing overwhelming challenges, especially in the short-wavelength range. Here, we suggest a novel planar design for chiral metasurfaces supporting bound states in the continuum (BICs) and demonstrate experimentally chiroptical responses with record-high Q-factors (Q=390) and near-perfect ci…
Curved reflective mirrors play an indispensable role in widely-employed Cassegrain-type optics, which consequently are inevitably bulky, and thus neither integratable nor well extendable. Through substituting geometric phase based reflective metasurfaces for curved mirrors, here a planar Cassegrain-type Schwarzschild objective is obtained, with both the focusing and imaging functionalities experimentally verified. The planar reflective objective achieved is intrinsically free of residual light and thus imposes less stringent restrictions on illuminating light and nanofabrications compared to i…
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a planar array of optical bandpass filters composed of low loss dielectric metasurface layers sandwiched between two distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). The two DBRs form a Fabry-Pérot resonator whose center wavelength is controlled by the design of the transmissive metasurface layer which functions as a phase shifting element. We demonstrate an array of bandpass filters with spatially varying center wavelengths covering a wide range of operation wavelengths of 250 nm around λ = 1550 nm (Δλ/λ = 16%). The center wavelengths of each filter are independe…
Optical metasurfaces are two-dimensional arrays of nano-scatterers that modify optical wavefronts at subwavelength spatial resolution. They are poised to revolutionize optics by enabling complex low-cost systems where multiple metasurfaces are lithographically stacked and integrated with electronics. For imaging applications, metasurface stacks can perform sophisticated image corrections and can be directly integrated with image sensors. Here, we demonstrate this concept with a miniature flat camera integrating a monolithic metasurface lens doublet corrected for monochromatic aberrations, and …
Chiral nanophotonic devices are promising candidates for chiral molecules sensing, polarization diverse nanophotonics and display technologies. Active chiral nanophotonic devices, where the optical chirality can be controlled by an external stimulus has triggered great research interest. However, efficient modulation of the optical chirality has been challenging. Here, we demonstrate switching of the extrinsic chirality by applied magnetic fields in a magneto-plasmonic metasurface device based on a magneto-optical oxide material, Ce1Y2Fe5O12 (Ce:YIG). Thanks to the low optical loss and strong …
Optically resonant dielectric metasurfaces offer unique capability to fully control the wavefront, polarisation, intensity or spectral content of light based on the excitation and interference of different electric and magnetic Mie multipolar resonances. Recent advances of the wide accessibility in the nanofabrication and nanotechnologies have led to a surge in the research field of high-quality functional optical metasurfaces which can potentially replace or even outperform conventional optical components with ultra-thin feature. Replacing conventional optical filtering components with metasu…
Chiral lasing via broken parity-time symmetry in bound-state-in-the-continuum metasurfaces
ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), Department of Electronic Materials Engineering, Research School of Physics, Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学变革性超光学系统卓越中心）
The replacement of bulk refractive optical elements with diffractive planar components enables the miniaturization of optical systems. However, diffractive optics suffers from large chromatic aberrations due to the dispersion of the phase accumulated by light during propagation. We show that this limitation can be overcome with an engineered wavelength-dependent phase shift imparted by a metasurface and demonstrate a design that deflects three wavelengths without dispersion. A planar lens without chromatic aberrations at three wavelengths is also presented. Our design is based on low-loss diel…
Terahertz (THz) chirality pursues customizable manipulation from narrowband to broadband. While conventional THz chirality is restricted by non-negligible linewidth and unable to handle narrowband well. Recently, the concept "quasi bound states in continuum" (quasi-BIC) is introduced to optics resonance system whose the quality factor can be extremely high with the ultra-low radiative loss, thus providing a conceptual feasibility for wave control with ultra-narrow linewidth. Herein, we construct quasi-BIC in a planar all-silicon THz metasurface with in-plane C2 and mirror symmetries breaking. …
The optical properties of infinite planar array of scattering particles, metasurfaces and metagratings, are attracting special attention lately for their rich phenomenology, including both plasmonic and high-refractive-index dielectric meta-atoms with a variety of electric and magnetic resonant responses. Herein we derive a coupled electric and magnetic dipole (CEMD) analytical formulation to describe the reflection and transmission of such periodic arrays, including specular and diffractive orders, valid in the spectral regimes where only dipolar multipoles are needed. Electric and/or magneti…
Spin-multiplexed terahertz image edge detection based on extrinsic chirality in all-dielectric metasurface
Sichuan Province Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Sensor Devices and Systems, College of Optoelectronic Engineering (Chengdu IC Valley Industrial College), Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学光电工程学院（成都IC谷产业学院））；Sichuan Meteorological Optoelectronic Sensor Technology and Application Engineering Research Center, Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学四川省气象光电传感器技术与应用工程研究中心）；School of Precision Instruments and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学精密仪器与光电子工程学院）
Thermal radiation from bulk disorderly placed nonresonant emitters is incoherent, broadband and isotropic. In an external magnetic field the thermal radiation from any source is circularly polarized. Here we propose a thermal radiation source which emits circularly polarized radiation and which is not placed in a magnetic field. The thermal source consists of a slab waveguide with etched chiral metasurface. Due to the absence of a mirror symmetry of the metasurface, the thermally generated electromagnetic waves become circularly polarized. In this letter we discuss the origin of this phenomeno…
Electromagnetic fields coupled with mechanical degrees of freedom have recently shown exceptional and innovative applications, ultimately leading to mesoscopic optomechanical devices operating in the quantum regime of motion. Simultaneously, micromechanical elements have provided new ways to enhance and manipulate the optical properties of passive photonic elements. Following this concept, in this article we show how combining a chiral metasurface with a GaAs suspended micromembrane can offer new scenarios for controlling the polarization state of near-infrared light beams. Starting from the u…
Metasurfaces are believed as one of the best candidates in nano-optical devices, attributed to the key feasible modulation features of phase, polarization, and local field enhancement by structural designing. However, current methods of propagation- and geometric-phase modulation are interrelated between two eigen spin-states. This means that when the left-handed component phase of a beam is modulated by metasurfaces, its right-handed component phase will change accordingly, which limits the versatility of spin-decoupled applications. In this paper, we experimentally and numerically demonstrat…
We demonstrate that rotationally symmetric chiral metasurfaces can support arbitrarily sharp resonances with the maximum optical chirality determined by precise shaping of bound states in the continuum (BICs). Being uncoupled from one circular polarisation of light and resonantly coupled to its counterpart, a metasurface hosting the chiral BIC resonance exhibits a narrow peak in the circular dichroism spectrum. We propose a realization of such chiral BIC metasurfaces based on pairs of dielectric bars and validate the concept of maximum chirality by numerical simulations
A general technique for synthesizing both planar and conformal beamforming metasurfaces is presented that utilizes full-wave modeling techniques and rapid optimization methods. The synthesized metasurfaces consist of a patterned metallic cladding supported by a finite-size grounded dielectric substrate. The metasurfaces are modeled using integral equations which accurately account for mutual coupling and the metasurface's finite dimensions. The synthesis technique consists of three phases: a direct solve phase to obtain an initial metasurface design with complex-valued impedances satisfying th…
We propose a Babinet-invertible chiral metasurface for achieving dynamically reversible and strong circular dichroism (CD). The proposed metasurface is composed of VO$_2$-metal hybrid structure, and when VO$_2$ transits between the dielectric state and the metallic state, the metasurface unit cell switches between complementary structures that are designed according to the Babinet principle. This leads to a large and reversible CD tuning range between $\pm 0.5$ at 0.97~THz, which is larger than the literature. We attribute the CD effect to extrinsic chirality of the proposed metasurface. We en…
Photonic band structures are a typical fingerprint of periodic optical structures, and are usually observed in spectroscopic quantities such as transmission, reflection and absorption. Here we show that also the chiro-optical response of a metasurface constituted by a lattice of non-centrosymmetric, L-shaped holes in a dielectric slab shows a band structure, where intrinsic and extrinsic chirality effects are clearly recognized and connected to localized and delocalized resonances. Superchiral near-fields can be excited in correspondence to these resonances, and anomalous behaviors as a functi…
We report on a chiral nanostructure, which we term a "butterfly nanoantenna," that, when used in a metasurface, allows the direct conversion of a linearly polarized beam into a nonlinear optical far-field of arbitrary complexity. The butterfly nanoantenna exhibits field enhancement in its gap for every incident linear polarization, which can be exploited to drive nonlinear optical emitters within the gap, for the structuring of light within a frequency range not accessible by linear plasmonics. As the polarization, phase and amplitude of the field in the gap are highly controlled, nonlinear em…
Optical Control of Chirality by Ultrafast Symmetry Breaking in Membrane Metasurfaces
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Shubnikov Institute of Crystallography, NRC “Kurchatov Institute”（库尔恰托夫国家研究中心舒比尼科夫晶体学研究所）；School of Physics and Engineering, ITMO University（ITMO大学物理与工程学院）；University of Brescia（布雷西亚大学）；Qingdao Innovation and Development Center, Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学青岛创新发展基地）；Theoretical Physics and Quantum Technologies Department, National University of Science and Technology ‘MISIS’（莫斯科国立科学技术大学“MISIS”理论与量子技术系）
Fano resonances are features in transmissivity/reflectivity/absorption that owe their origin to the interaction between a bright resonance and a dark (i.e., sub-radiant) narrower resonance, and may emerge in the optical properties of planar two-dimensional (2D) periodic arrays (metasurfaces) of plasmonic nanoparticles. In this Letter, we provide a thorough assessment of their nature for the general case of normal and oblique plane wave incidence, highlighting when a Fano resonance is affected by the mutual coupling in an array and its capability to support free modal solutions. We analyze the …
Metasurfaces, with intrinsically planar nature and subwavelength thickness, provide us unconventional methodologies to not only mold the flow of propagating waves but also manipulate near-field waves. Plasmonic metasurfaces with topological transition for controlling surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) recently have been experimentally demonstrated, which, however, are limited to optical frequencies. In this work, we proposed and experimentally characterized an ultrathin metasurface with the topological transition for manipulating spoof SPPs at low frequency. We demonstrated rich interesting phe…
Metasurfaces are planar optical elements that hold promise for overcoming the limitations of refractive and conventional diffractive optics1-3. Dielectric metasurfaces demonstrated thus far4-10 are limited to transparency windows at infrared wavelengths because of significant optical absorption and loss at visible wavelengths. It is critical that new materials and fabrication techniques be developed for dielectric metasurfaces at visible wavelengths to enable applications such as three-dimensional displays, wearable optics and planar optical systems11. Here, we demonstrate high performance tit…
We study semi-analytically the light emission and absorption properties of arbitrary stratified photonic structures with embedded two-dimensional magnetoelectric point scattering lattices, as used in recent plasmon-enhanced LEDs and solar cells. By employing dyadic Green's function for the layered structure in combination with Ewald lattice summation to deal with the particle lattice, we develop an efficient method to study the coupling between planar 2D scattering lattices of plasmonic, or metamaterial point particles, coupled to layered structures. Using the `array scanning method' we deal w…
Non-Hermitian degeneracies, also known as exceptional points (EPs), have been the focus of much attention due to their singular eigenvalue surface structure. Nevertheless, as pertaining to a non-Hermitian metasurface platform, the reduction of an eigenspace dimensionality at the EP has been investigated mostly in a passive repetitive manner. Here, we propose an electrical and spectral way of resolving chiral EPs and clarifying the consequences of chiral mode collapsing of a non-Hermitian gated graphene metasurface. More specifically, the measured non-Hermitian Jones matrix in parameter space e…
Metasurfaces are two-dimensional optical structures enabling complete control of the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light. Unlike plasmonic metasurfaces, planar silicon structures facilitate high transmission, low losses and compatibility with existing semiconductor technologies. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of high-efficiency polarization- sensitive dielectric metasurfaces with full 2pi phase control in transmission mode at telecommunication wavelengths. Such silicon metasurfaces are poised to enable a versatile optical platform the realization of all-optical circuitry…
