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Title: Focusing on bandwidth: achromatic metalens limits

Metalenses have shown great promise in their ability to function as ultracompact optical systems for focusing and imaging. Remarkably, several designs have been recently demonstrated that operate over a large range of frequencies with minimized chromatic aberrations, potentially paving the way for ultrathin achromatic optics. Here, we derive fundamental bandwidth limits that apply to broadband optical metalenses regardless of their implementation. Specifically, we discuss how the product between achievable time delay and bandwidth is limited in any time-invariant system, and we apply well-established bounds on this product to a general focusing system. We then show that all metalenses designed thus far obey the appropriate bandwidth limit. The derived physical bounds provide a useful metric to compare and assess the performance of different devices, and they offer fundamental insight into how to design better broadband metalenses.

 
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NSF-PAR ID:
10157585
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Optical Society of America
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Optica
Volume:
7
Issue:
6
ISSN:
2334-2536
Page Range / eLocation ID:
Article No. 624
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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