High-Performance Flat Optics—From Metasurfaces to High-Volume Manufacturing for Consumer Electronics and Communications

Since the demonstration of the generalized laws of refraction for metasurfaces¹ and the first high performance metalenses², metaoptics has rapidly progressed from the laboratory to manufacturing, propelled by the vision that the foundries that manufacture ICs will manufacture CMOS compatible flat optics using the same semiconductor technology based on deep-UV lithography.^3,4This will impact the consumer electronics market in areas such as smart phones and wearable displays for AR/VR. Metasurfaces are now on the market through its partnership with STMicroelectronics, marking the introduction of this revolutionary optical technology in real-world devices.⁵ I will present recent major advances in cm scale achromatic RGB metalenses for VR by inverse design⁶ and 10 cm metalenses for space optics consisting of 20 billion metatoms.⁷ A compact and highly integrated metasurface-based inverse designed mode multiplexer that takes three single-mode fiber inputs and converts them into the first three linearly polarized spatial modes of a few-mode fiber with high fidelity the C-band (1530−1565 nm) of fiber optics will be presented.⁸ I will conclude with the report of hybrid silicon-organic electrooptic metasurface modulators that use Mie resonances for efficient electro-optic modulation at GHz speeds for free-space communications. ⁹<br/>Nanfang Yu, et al. <i>Science</i>, 334, 333 (2011)<br/>Mohammadreza Khorasaninejad, et al. <i>Science,</i> 352, 1190 (2016)<br/>Federico Capasso,<i> Nanophotonics</i>, 7, 953 (2018)<br/>Alan She et al., <i>Optics Express</i>, 26, 1573 (2018)<br/>https://newsroom.st.com/media-center/press-item.html/t4458.html; https://www.metalenz.com<br/>Zhaoyi Li et al. <i>Nature Communications</i>, 13, 2409 (2022)<br/>Joon-Suh Park et al. “All-Glass, Mass-Producible, Large-Diameter Metalens at Visible Wavelength for 100 mm Aperture Optics and Beyond” CLEO 2022<br/>Jaewon Oh et al. <i>ACS Photonics</i> 9, 929 (2022)<br/>Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus et al. <i>Nature Communications,</i> 13, 3170 (2022)