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1. Broadband achromatic dielectric metalenses

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-018-0078-x  

   Shrestha, Sajan ; Overvig, Adam C. ; Lu, Ming ; Stein, Aaron ; Yu, Nanfang ( November 2018 , Light: Science & Applications)

   Metasurfaces offer a unique platform to precisely control optical wavefronts and enable the realization of flat lenses, or metalenses, which have the potential to substantially reduce the size and complexity of imaging systems and to realize new imaging modalities. However, it is a major challenge to create achromatic metalenses that produce a single focal length over a broad wavelength range because of the difficulty in simultaneously engineering phase profiles at distinct wavelengths on a single metasurface. For practical applications, there is a further challenge to create broadband achromatic metalenses that work in the transmission mode for incident light waves with any arbitrary polarization state. We developed a design methodology and created libraries of meta-units—building blocks of metasurfaces—with complex cross-sectional geometries to provide diverse phase dispersions (phase as a function of wavelength), which is crucial for creating broadband achromatic metalenses. We elucidated the fundamental limitations of achromatic metalens performance by deriving mathematical equations that govern the tradeoffs between phase dispersion and achievable lens parameters, including the lens diameter, numerical aperture (NA), and bandwidth of achromatic operation. We experimentally demonstrated several dielectric achromatic metalenses reaching the fundamental limitations. These metalenses work in the transmission mode with polarization-independent focusing efficiencies up to 50% and continuously provide a near-constant focal length overλ = 1200–1650 nm. These unprecedented properties represent a major advance compared to the state of the art and a major step toward practical implementations of metalenses.

    

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2. Plasmonic metasurfaces with 42.3% transmission efficiency in the visible

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-019-0164-8  

   Zhang, Jihua ; ElKabbash, Mohamed ; Wei, Ran ; Singh, Subhash C. ; Lam, Billy ; Guo, Chunlei ( June 2019 , Light: Science & Applications)

   Metasurfaces are two-dimensional nanoantenna arrays that can control the propagation of light at will. In particular, plasmonic metasurfaces feature ultrathin thicknesses, ease of fabrication, field confinement beyond the diffraction limit, superior nonlinear properties, and ultrafast performances. However, the technological relevance of plasmonic metasurfaces operating in the transmission mode at optical frequencies is questionable due to their limited efficiency. The state-of-the-art efficiency of geometric plasmonic metasurfaces at visible and near-infrared frequencies, for example, is ≤10%. Here, we report a multipole-interference-based transmission-type geometric plasmonic metasurface with a polarization conversion efficiency that reaches 42.3% at 744 nm, over 400% increase over the state of the art. The efficiency is augmented by breaking the scattering symmetry due to simultaneously approaching the generalized Kerker condition for two orthogonal polarizations. In addition, the design of the metasurface proposed in this study introduces an air gap between the antennas and the surrounding media that confines the field within the gap, which mitigates the crosstalk between meta-atoms and minimizes metallic absorption. The proposed metasurface is broadband, versatile, easy to fabricate, and highly tolerant to fabrication errors. We highlight the technological relevance of our plasmonic metasurface by demonstrating a transmission-type beam deflector and hologram with record efficiencies.

    

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3. A monolithic immersion metalens for imaging solid-state quantum emitters

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10238-5  

   Huang, Tzu-Yung ; Grote, Richard R. ; Mann, Sander A. ; Hopper, David A. ; Exarhos, Annemarie L. ; Lopez, Gerald G. ; Klein, Amelia R. ; Garnett, Erik C. ; Bassett, Lee C. ( June 2019 , Nature Communications)

   Quantum emitters such as the diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center are the basis for a wide range of quantum technologies. However, refraction and reflections at material interfaces impede photon collection, and the emitters’ atomic scale necessitates the use of free space optical measurement setups that prevent packaging of quantum devices. To overcome these limitations, we design and fabricate a metasurface composed of nanoscale diamond pillars that acts as an immersion lens to collect and collimate the emission of an individual NV center. The metalens exhibits a numerical aperture greater than 1.0, enabling efficient fiber-coupling of quantum emitters. This flexible design will lead to the miniaturization of quantum devices in a wide range of host materials and the development of metasurfaces that shape single-photon emission for coupling to optical cavities or route photons based on their quantum state.

    

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4. High-efficiency, large-area, topology-optimized metasurfaces

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-019-0159-5  

   Phan, Thaibao ; Sell, David ; Wang, Evan W. ; Doshay, Sage ; Edee, Kofi ; Yang, Jianji ; Fan, Jonathan A. ( May 2019 , Light: Science & Applications)

   Metasurfaces are ultrathin optical elements that are highly promising for constructing lightweight and compact optical systems. For their practical implementation, it is imperative to maximize the metasurface efficiency. Topology optimization provides a pathway for pushing the limits of metasurface efficiency; however, topology optimization methods have been limited to the design of microscale devices due to the extensive computational resources that are required. We introduce a new strategy for optimizing large-area metasurfaces in a computationally efficient manner. By stitching together individually optimized sections of the metasurface, we can reduce the computational complexity of the optimization from high-polynomial to linear. As a proof of concept, we design and experimentally demonstrate large-area, high-numerical-aperture silicon metasurface lenses with focusing efficiencies exceeding 90%. These concepts can be generalized to the design of multifunctional, broadband diffractive optical devices and will enable the implementation of large-area, high-performance metasurfaces in practical optical systems.

    

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5. Metasurface holographic optical traps for ultracold atoms

   Huang, Xiaoyan ; Yuan, Weijun ; Holman, Aaron ; Kwon, Minho ; Masson, Stuart J. ; Gutierrez-Jauregui, Ricardo ; Asenjo-Garcia, Ana ; Will, Sebastian ; Yu, Nanfang ( January 2023 , Progress in Quantum Electronics)

   We propose metasurface holograms as a novel platform to generate optical trap arrays for cold atoms with high fidelity, efficiency, and thermal stability. We developed design and fabrication methodologies to create dielectric, phase-only metasurface holograms based on titanium dioxide. We experimentally demonstrated optical trap arrays of various geometries, including periodic and aperiodic configurations with dimensions ranging from 1D to 3D and the number of trap sites up to a few hundred. We characterized the performance of the holographic metasurfaces in terms of the positioning accuracy, size and intensity uniformity of the generated traps, and power handling capability of the dielectric metasurfaces. Our proposed platform has great potential for enabling fundamental studies of quantum many-body physics, and quantum simulation and computation tasks. The compact form factor, passive nature, good power handling capability, and scalability of generating high-quality, large-scale arrays also make the metasurface platform uniquely suitable for realizing field-deployable devices and systems based on cold atoms. 

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