Large area metalenses: design, characterization, and mass manufacturing

Abstract

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.

Imaging with flat optics: metalenses or diffractive lenses?

“…Here, we combine this multi-level approach with parametric optimization to show that high efficiency at high numerical aperture is feasible for both narrowband and broadband operation, which we believe has not been clearly demonstrated before. Recently, metalenses were proposed as a means to reduce the overall thickness of the conventional diffractive lens to sub-wavelength regimes by exploiting magnified phase changes that can occur in resonators [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. Rather than using traversed path to create a phase shift, appropriately designed subwavelength antenna elements could achieve the same effect (see Fig.…”

Reconfigurable metasurface hologram by utilizing addressable dynamic pixels

“…With tailored artificial subwavelength building blocks, metasurfaces are able to manipulate the local and far-field light, thus enabling a new generation of ultrathin optical elements with a broad range of functionalities [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. By utilizing metasurfaces as information carriers, metasurface holograms are able to store and reconstruct full wave information of target objects.…”

Miniaturized Metalens Based Optical Tweezers on Liquid Crystal Droplets for Lab-on-a-Chip Optical Motors

“…[6,16] Metalenses have emerged from the advance in the development of metasurfaces providing a new basis for recasting traditional lenses into thin, planar optical components, having similar or even better performance at smaller scales. In the near future with higher efficiency and cheaper production, [17] these metalenses have a high potential to replace traditional lenses in several applications, e.g., imaging systems, optical data storage, laser printing, and optical communications. Their ultrathin sizes can also benefit the development of optical Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices.…”