Metasurfaces
are arrays of subwavelength anisotropic light scatters (optical
antennas) that can produce abrupt changes in the phase, amplitude, or
polarization of light. Within the last few years, there has been significant progress, including design of metasurfaces that refract and focus light, enabling many
unique properties and applications such as holograms, optical vortex
generation/detection, ultrathin focusing lens, perfect absorber, etc.
This
tutorial will cover the fundamental principles, advanced designs and
technological applications of optical metasurfaces, focusing on the
topics of (I) High Performance Metasurface Flat Optics: from Components
to Systems, (II) Nonlinear Optical Metasurfaces, (III) Electrically
Tunable Metamaterials and Metasurfaces for Control of Absorption,
Emission and Scattering, and (IV) Optimization and machine learning for
metasurface design.
High Performance Metasurface Flat Optics—From Components to Systems
Federico Capasso, Harvard University
Metasurfaces
are leading to the emergence of new optical components that circumvent
the limitations of standard refractive and diffractive one by enabling
dispersion engineering, which also leads to entirely new functionalities
based on the local control of phase amplitude and polarization.
Dispersion engineering has led to the demonstration of metalenses with
correction of monochromatic aberrations and to achromatic metalenses and
hybrid refractive/diffractive doublets across the visible spectrum. The
planarity of flat optics will lead to the unification of semiconductor
manufacturing and lens-making; recent industrial advances in this
direction will be discussed. Polarization optics, polarimeters and
polarization sensitive cameras without moving parts and conventional
birefringent optics will be presented. Metasurfaces also offer fresh
opportunities for structuring light as well as the dark. This session will cover
spin to total orbital angular momentum (OAM) converters and OAM lasing,
as well as flat devices that enable light’s spin and OAM to evolve,
simultaneously, from one state to another along the propagation
direction. Finally, the demonstration of 2D phase and polarization
singularities and the unique applications that they will open will be
discussed.
Optimization and Machine Learning for Metasurface Design
Jonathan Albert Fan, Stanford University
Inverse
design, in which the design process is performed through iterative
optimization, has the potential to push metasurface performance to the
physical limits of composite materials engineering. In this tutorial, we
will discuss a range of state-of-the-art numerical optimization methods
for metasurface design. We will introduce the objective-first and
adjoint variables methods, which are gradient-based optimization
concepts that can produce high performance freeform geometries. We will
also provide an overview of machine learning techniques as applied to
electromagnetics problems and show how generative neural networks can be
harnessed as an effective global optimizer for photonic devices.
Electrically Tunable Metamaterials and Metasurfaces for Control of Absorption, Emission and Scattering
Harry Atwater, California Institute of Technology
Progress
in understanding resonant subwavelength optical structures has fueled a
worldwide explosion of interest in both fundamental processes and
nanophotonic devices for imaging, sensing, solar energy conversion and
thermal radiation control. For most nanophotonic materials, the optical
properties are encoded and fixed permanently into the nanoscale
structure at the time of fabrication. Achieving electronic tunability of
the optical properties is an emerging opportunity to bring
metamaterials and metasurfaces to life as dynamic objects composed of
tunable nanoscale resonators and antennas. Gated field effect tuning of
the carrier density in conducting oxides and two-dimensional materials
enables the optical dispersion of individual structures to be altered
from dielectric to plasmonic, yielding active nano-antenna arrays with
electrically tunable absorption, radiative emission and scattering
properties.
Nonlinear Optical Metasurfaces: From Enhanced Light-Matter-Interaction to Functional Elements
Thomas Zentgraf, Paderborn University
For
efficient nonlinear processes, the engineering of the nonlinear optical
properties of media becomes an important task. The most well-known
technique for spatially engineering nonlinear optical properties is the
quasi-phase matching scheme for second-order processes like second
harmonic generation. However, the widely used technique of periodic
polling of natural crystals only provides a binary state for the
nonlinear material polarization, which is equivalent to a discrete phase
change of π of the nonlinear polarization. The continuous tailoring of
the phase of the nonlinear susceptibility would greatly enhance
flexibility in the design and reduce parasitic effects. In this
tutorial, we will discuss nonlinear metamaterials with a continuously
controllable phase of the local effective nonlinear polarizability. We
will focus on plasmonic metasurfaces with various designs for the
meta-atom geometry together with different polarization states of the
light. In particular for circular polarization states, the controllable
nonlinearity phase results from the phase accumulation due to the
polarization change along the polarization path on the Poincare Sphere
(the so-called Pancharatnam-Berry phase) and depends therefore only on
the spatial geometry of the metasurface. By using a fixed orientation of
the meta-atom, the nonlinear phase can be spatially arbitrarily
tailored over the entire range from 0 to 2π. In contrast to the
quasi-phase matching scheme, the continuous phase engineering of the
effective nonlinear polarizability enables complete control of the
propagation of harmonic generation signals, and therefore, it seamlessly
combines the generation and manipulation of the harmonic waves for
highly compact nonlinear nanophotonic devices. We will discuss the
concepts of enhancing nonlinear processes with simultaneous phase
engineering for the manipulation of second- and third-harmonic
generation from metasurfaces and the restrictions with respect to
symmetry and geometry of meta-atoms. Nonlinear metamaterials have
fundamental significance in nonlinear optics and for tailored
nonlinearities, as they provide a further degree of freedom in the
design of nonlinear materials.