Recent Advances in Polarization‐Encoded Optical Metasurfaces

Abstract

In recent years, optical metasurfaces, i.e., surface‐confined arrays of engineered nanostructured elements (meta‐atoms), have become an emerging research area due to their unprecedented capabilities of manipulating light with subwavelength spatial resolutions. The metasurfaces revolutionize thereby conventional bulky optics with compact planar elements. As the polarization is one of the intrinsic properties of light and of crucial importance for fundamental sciences and practical applications, the polarization‐encoded functional optical metasurfaces featuring compactness, integration compatibility, and multiple functionalities have been in the focus of intensive research and development. Herein, the basic principles and emerging applications of polarization‐encoded functional metasurfaces operating in the optical range are reviewed. Starting with the description of different polarization states, the review proceeds with considerations of how to interconvert and detect the state of polarization. The main achievements in polarization‐multiplexing metasurface components (metadevices) are then summarized. Finally, a personal outlook on potential directions in this fast‐growing research area is provided in the conclusions.

Dynamic Control of Light Chirality with Nanostructured Monolayer Black Phosphorus for Broadband Terahertz Applications

“…Importantly, with our proposed configuration, direct generation of CPL from single-photon sources (such as molecules, atomic defects, or quantum dots) that typically emit light in the form of linear optical dipoles, is possible, without the need for coupling with chiral nanoantennas, or operation under high magnetic fields at very low temperatures to achieve chiral emission. [37][38][39] Compared to modern bulk, [51][52][53] and even modern metamaterial polarization converters, [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] the proposed BP array is ideal for device miniaturization as the BP patches have nanoscale dimensions and the BP layer itself is atomically thin. The plasmon dispersion of BP for increasing number of layers (up to ≈20 nm thick films) versus the carrier concentration remains mostly unchanged, simply scaling as n β where β < 1/2 (instead of the single layer scaling of n 1/2 ).…”

“…[1][2][3] In recent years, several approaches have been proposed in order to achieve the desired polarization control. Metallic metasurfaces sustaining strong plasmonic modes [4][5][6][7][8] , dielectric resonators utilizing Mie modes [9] and all-dielectric metasurfaces [8,[10][11][12][13] have provided the desired functionalities within electrically thin volumes. To achieve cross-polarization conversion, these structures involve anisotropic [14,15] or chiral geometries, [16][17][18] which are often complex.…”

Molding Photon Emission with Hybrid Plasmon‐Emitter Coupled Metasurfaces

“…[ 29–34 ] The problem of generating complicated wave fronts with arbitrarily designed polarizations distributions is of great importance in photonics, in general, and in the field of optical metasurfaces, in particular. [ 35–40 ] Very recently, efficient approaches using local control of the phase and polarization of transmitted/reflected light have been developed for designing optical metasurfaces that perform rather complicated transformations of wave fronts and polarizations in transmission [ 41 ] and reflection [ 42 ] configurations. Although the main principles of holography and its many modalities are well known and established for free propagating (object and reference) optical beams, the problem of reconstructing beams with arbitrary wave fronts and polarizations when using (QE‐excited) circularly diverging SPP fields have not been considered.…”

“…[29][30][31][32][33][34] The problem of generating complicated wave fronts with arbitrarily designed polarizations distributions is of great importance in photonics, in general, and in the field of optical metasurfaces, in particular. [35][36][37][38][39][40] Very recently, efficient approaches using local control of the phase and polarization of transmitted/reflected light have been developed for designing optical metasurfaces that perform rather complicated transformations of wave fronts and polarizations in transmission [41] and reflection [42] configurations. Although the main Directional emission of photons with designed polarizations and orbital angular momenta is crucial for exploiting the full potential of quantum emitters (QEs) within quantum information technologies.…”

Quantum Hybrid Plasmonic Nanocircuits for Versatile Polarized Photon Generation

“…where amplitude (A x , A y ) and phase difference (δ = φ x − φ y ) were used to calculate the Stokes parameters to identify the polarization states. [46] S…”