We present a complementary THz metasurface realised with Niobium thin film which displays a quality factor Q=54 and a fully switchable behaviour as a function of the temperature. The switching behaviour and the high quality factor are due to a careful design of the metasurface aimed at maximising the ohmic losses when the Nb is above the critical temperature and minimising the radiative coupling. The superconductor allows the operation of the cavity with an high Q and inductive elements with an high aspect ratio. Comparison with three dimensional finite element simulations highlights the crucial role of the inductive elements and of the kinetic inductance of the Cooper pairs in achieving the high quality factor and the high field enhancement.
Switchable and active metasurfaces allow for the realization of beam steering, zoomable metalenses, or dynamic holography. To achieve this goal, one has to combine high-performance metasurfaces with switchable materials that exhibit high refractive index contrast and high switching speeds. In this work, we present an electrochemically switchable metasurface for beam steering where we use the conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylene-dioxythiophene) (PEDOT) as an active material. We show beam diffraction with angles up to 10{deg} and change of the intensities of the diffracted and primary beams employing an externally applied cyclic voltage between -1 V and +0.5 V. With this unique combination, we realize switching speeds in the range of 1 Hz while the extension to typical display frequencies in the tens of Hz region is possible. Our findings have immediate implications on the design and fabrication of future electronically switchable and display nanotechnologies, such as dynamic holograms.
We investigate the design, fabrication and experimental characterization of high Quality factor photonic crystal nanobeam cavities in silicon. Using a five-hole tapered 1D photonic crystal mirror and precise control of the cavity length, we designed cavities with theoretical Quality factors as high as 14 million. By detecting the cross-polarized resonantly scattered light from a normally incident laser beam, we measure a Quality factor of nearly 750,000. The effect of cavity size on mode frequency and Quality factor was simulated and then verified experimentally.
While nanoscale color generations have been studied for years, high performance transmission structural colors, simultaneously equipped with large gamut, high resolution, low loss and optical multiplexing abilities, still remain as a hanging issue. Here, beneficial from metasurfaces, we demonstrate a silicon metasurface embedded Fabry-Perot cavity (meta-FP cavity), with polydimethylsiloxanes (PDMS) surrounding media and silver film mirrors. By changing the planar geometries of the embedded nanopillars, the meta-FP cavity provides transmission colors with ultra large gamut of 194% sRGB and ultrahigh resolution of 141111 DPI, along with considerably average transmittance of 43% and more than 300% enhanced angular tolerance. Such high density allows two-dimensional color mixing at diffraction limit scale. The color gamut and the resolution can be flexibly tuned and improved by modifying the silver film thickness and the lattice period. The polarization manipulation ability of the metasurface also enables arbitrary color arrangement between cyan and red for two orthogonal linear polarization states, at deep subwavelength scale. Our proposed cavities can be used in filters, printings, optical storages and many other applications in need of high quality and density colors.
We present high quality factor optical nanoresonators operating in the mid-IR to far-IR based on phonon polaritons in van der Waals materials. The nanoresonators are disks patterned from isotopically pure hexagonal boron nitride (isotopes 10B and 11B) and {alpha}-molybdenum trioxide. We experimentally achieved quality factors of nearly 400, the highest ever observed in nano-resonators at these wavelengths. The excited modes are deeply subwavelength, and the resonators are 10 to 30 times smaller than the exciting wavelength. These results are very promising for the realization of nano-photonics devices such as optical bio-sensors and miniature optical components such as polarizers and filters.
Here we make use of vanadium dioxide (VO2) to design a bifunctional metasurface working at the same targeted frequency. With the increase of temperature, the functionality of the designed metasurface can switch from a multi-channel retroreflector to a perfect absorber, caused by the phase transition of VO2 from insulator to conductor. Different from traditional bifunctional metasurfaces designed by simple composition of two functionalities, our proposed bifunctional metasurface is based on the interaction between two functionalities. The device shows good potential for the combination of wavefront manipulation and optical absorption, therefore providing a promising approach for switchable detection and anti-detection devices.