Artificial muscle corrects metalens aberrations on the fly.
Metalenses, planar lenses realized by placing subwavelength nanostructures that locally impart lenslike phase shifts to the incident light, are promising as a replacement for refractive optics for their ultrathin, lightweight, and tailorable characteristics, especially for applications where payload is of significant importance. However, the requirement of fabricating up to billions of subwavelength structures for centimeter-scale metalenses can constrain size-scalability and mass-production for large lenses. In this Letter, we demonstrate a centimeter-scale, all-glass metalens capable of focusing and imaging at visible wavelength, using deep-ultraviolet (DUV) projection stepper lithography. Here, we show size-scalability and potential for mass-production by fabricating 45 metalenses of 1 cm diameter on a 4 in. fused-silica wafer. The lenses show diffraction-limited focusing behavior for any homogeneously polarized incidence at visible wavelengths. The metalens’ performance is quantified by the Strehl ratio and the modulation transfer function (MTF), which are then compared with commercial refractive spherical and aspherical singlet lenses of similar size and focal length. We further explore the imaging capabilities of our metalens using a color-pixel sCMOS camera and scanning-imaging techniques, demonstrating potential applications for virtual reality (VR) devices or biological imaging techniques.
Optical components, such as lenses, have traditionally been made in the bulk form by shaping glass or other transparent materials. Recent advances in metasurfaces provide a new basis for recasting optical components into thin, planar elements, having similar or better performance using arrays of subwavelength-spaced optical phase-shifters. The technology required to mass produce them dates back to the mid-1990s, when the feature sizes of semiconductor manufacturing became considerably denser than the wavelength of light, advancing in stride with Moore's law. This provides the possibility of unifying two industries: semiconductor manufacturing and lens-making, whereby the same technology used to make computer chips is used to make optical components, such as lenses, based on metasurfaces. Using a scalable metasurface layout compression algorithm that exponentially reduces design file sizes (by 3 orders of magnitude for a centimeter diameter lens) and stepper photolithography, we show the design and fabrication of metasurface lenses (metalenses) with extremely large areas, up to centimeters in diameter and beyond. Using a single two-centimeter diameter near-infrared metalens less than a micron thick fabricated in this way, we experimentally implement the ideal thin lens equation, while demonstrating high-quality imaging and diffractionlimited focusing.
In the Cherenkov effect a charged particle moving with a velocity faster than the phase velocity of light in the medium radiates light that forms a cone with a half angle determined by the ratio of the two speeds. Here, we show that by creating a running wave of polarization along a one-dimensional metallic nanostructure consisting of subwavelength-spaced rotated apertures that propagates faster than the surface plasmon polariton phase velocity, we can generate surface plasmon wakes, a two-dimensional analogue of Cherenkov radiation. The running wave of polarization travels with a speed determined by the angle of incidence and the photon spin angular momentum of the incident radiation. By changing either one of these properties we demonstrate controlled steering of the Cherenkov surface plasmon wakes.
Novel optical components based on metasurfaces (metalenses) offer a new methodology for microlens arrays. In particular, metalens arrays have the potential of being monolithically integrated with infrared focal plane arrays (IR FPAs) to increase the operating temperature and sensitivity of the latter. In this work, we demonstrate a new type of transmissive metalens that focuses the incident light (λ = 3 -5 μm) on the detector plane after propagating through the substrate, i.e. solid-immersion type of focusing. The metalens is fabricated by etching the backside of the detector substrate material (GaSb here) making this approach compatible with the architecture of back-illuminated FPAs. In addition, our designs work for all incident polarizations. We fabricate a 10x10 metalens array that proves the scalability of this approach for FPAs. In the future, these solid-immersion metalenses arrays will be monolithically integrated with IR FPAs.Infrared focal plane arrays (IR FPAs) are commonly used in thermal cameras, medical imaging devices and for sensing applications such as wavefront sensing 1 . Microlenses and microspheres have been previously used as optical concentrators 2-9 to increase the operating temperature of IR FPAs, but they are typically made of materials different from the detector materials and therefore these approaches require additional deposition and alignments steps. Recently, mid-wavelength IR (MWIR) nBn detectors monolithically integrated with spherical concentrators fabricated on the detector backside were demonstrated 10 . This provides an alternative approach for realization of microlens-integrated detectors in which microlenses are made from the detector substrate material. The newly developed metasurfaces are a promising candidate for the next generation optical concentrators that can also be monolithically integrated with IR FPAs with small pixels. They can be fabricated from the same material as the substrate and are flat, ultrathin, and lightweight. Metasurfaces consist of optical components based on arrays of optical resonators with subwavelength separation. By accurately designing the optical properties of each element of the array, the wavefront of the incident light can be reshaped and redirected at will 11 . Numerous devices based on metasurfaces have been developed, including metasurface lenses (metalenses), waveplates, polarimeters, and holograms [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] .To be compatible with current IR FPAs, these metalenses have to feature several unique characteristics which differentiate them from the metalenses demonstrated so far. The majority of IR FPAs are back-illuminated (through the substrate), so the lens needs to be transmissive and of the immersion type to focus light in the detector materials. The lens also needs to be fabricated on
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