Achieving spatiotemporal control of light at high speeds presents immense possibilities for various applications in communication, computation, metrology, and sensing. The integration of subwavelength metasurfaces and optical waveguides offers a promising approach to manipulate light across multiple degrees of freedom at high speed in compact photonic integrated circuit (PIC) devices. Here, we demonstrate a gigahertz-rate-switchable wavefront shaping by integrating metasurface, lithium niobate on insulator photonic waveguides, and electrodes within a PIC device. As proofs of concept, we showcase the generation of a focus beam with reconfigurable arbitrary polarizations, switchable focusing with lateral focal positions and focal length, orbital angular momentum light beams as well as Bessel beams. Our measurements indicate modulation speeds of up to the gigahertz rate. This integrated platform offers a versatile and efficient means of controlling the light field at high speed within a compact system, paving the way for potential applications in optical communication, computation, sensing, and imaging.
The refractive-lens technique has been well developed over a long period of evolution, offering powerful imaging functionalities, such as microscopes, telescopes, and spectroscopes. Nevertheless, the ever-growing requirements continue to urge further enhanced imaging capabilities and upgraded devices that are more compact for convenience. Metamaterial as a fascinating concept has inspired unprecedented new explorations in physics, material science, and optics, not only in fundamental researches but also novel applications. Along with the imaging topic, this paper reviews the progress of the flat lens as an important branch of metamaterials, covering the early superlens with super-diffraction capability and current hot topics of metalenses including a paralleled strategy of multilevel diffractive lenses. Numerous efforts and approaches have been dedicated to areas ranging from the new fascinating physics to feasible applications. This review provides a clear picture of the flat-lens evolution from the perspective of metamaterial design, elucidating the relation and comparison between a superlens and metalens, and addressing derivative designs. Finally, application scenarios that favor the ultrathin lens technique are emphasized with respect to possible revolutionary imaging devices, followed by conclusive remarks and prospects.
Microscopy is very important in research and industry, yet traditional optical microscopy suffers from the limited field-of-view (FOV) and depth-of-field (DOF) in high-resolution imaging. We demonstrate a simultaneous large FOV and DOF microscope imaging technology based on a chip-scale metalens device that is implemented by a SiNx metalens array with a co- and cross-polarization multiplexed dual-phase design and dispersive spectrum zoom effect. A 4-mm × 4-mm FOV is obtained with a resolution of 1.74 μm and DOF of 200 μm within a wavelength range of 450 to 510 nm, which definitely exceeds the performance of traditional microscopes with the same resolution. Moreover, it is realized in a miniaturized compact prototype, showing an overall advantage for portable and convenient microscope technology.
Metasurfaces have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in manipulating light with ultrathin and flat architectures. Although great progress has been made in the metasurface designs and function demonstrations, most metalenses still only work as a substitution of conventional lenses in optical settings, whose integration advantage is rarely manifested. We propose a highly integrated imaging device with silicon metalenses directly mounted on a complementary metal oxide semiconductor image sensor, whose working distance is in hundreds of micrometers. The imaging performances including resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and field of view (FOV) are investigated. Moreover, we develop a metalens array with polarization-multiplexed dual-phase design for a wide-field microscopic imaging. This approach remarkably expands the FOV without reducing the resolution, which promises a non-limited space-bandwidth product imaging for wide-field microscopy. As a result, we demonstrate a centimeter-scale prototype for microscopic imaging, showing uniqueness of meta-design for compact integration.
We design and fabricate a 60 × 60 GaN based achromatic meta-lens array to capture multidimensional optical information of the scene. The working wavelength is from 400 nm to 660 nm which covers the entire visible light range. The highest efficiency of single metalens can be up to 74% at a wavelength of 420 nm, while the average efficiency is approximately 39% over the whole working bandwidth. The light field images and the depth information of objects can be determined by reorganizing the patches of sub-images and calculating the disparity of neighboring sub-images, respectively. The depth information can be used to optimize the patch sizes to render the all-in-focus image without artifacts. Our work provides several advantages associated with light field imaging: elimination of chromatic aberration, polarization selectivity and compatibility of the semiconductor process.
Optical meta-devices using meta-surfaces which composed of artificial nanostructures are able to manipulate the electromagnetic phase and amplitude at will. The great advantages of meta-devices are their new properties, lighter weight, small size, high efficiency, better performance, broadband operation, lower energy consumption, and CMOS compatibility for mass production. Given the demand for photonics, many optical meta-devices for the application and control of incident light are being quickly developed for beam deflection and reflection, polarization control and analysis, holography, second-harmonic generation, laser, tunability, imaging, absorption, focusing of light, multiplex color routing and light-field sensing. The design, fabrication and application of the novel optical meta-devices are reported in this talk.
Self-imaging is an important function for signal transport, distribution, and processing in integrated optics, which is usually implemented by multimode interference or diffractive imaging process. However, these processes suffer from the resolution limit due to classical wave propagation dynamics. We propose and demonstrate subwavelength optical imaging in one-dimensional silicon waveguide arrays, which is implemented by cascading straight and curved waveguides in sequence. The coupling coefficient between the curved waveguides is tuned to be negative to reach a negative dispersion, which is an analog to a hyperbolic metamaterial with a negative refractive index. Therefore, it endows the waveguide array with a superlens function as it is connected with a traditional straight waveguide array with positive dispersion. With a judiciously engineered cascading silicon waveguide array, we successfully show the subwavelength self-imaging process of each input port of the waveguide array as the single point source. Our approach provides a strategy for dealing with optical signals at the subwavelength scale and indicates functional designs in high-density waveguide integrations.
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