No Arabic abstract
We present, discuss and validate an adapted S-matrix formalism for an efficient, simplified treatment of stacked homogeneous periodically structured metasurfaces operated under normally incident plane wave excitation. The proposed formalism can be applied to any material system, arbitrarily shaped metaatoms, at any frequency and with arbitrary subwavelength periods. Circumventing the introduction of any kind of effective parameters we directly use the S-parameters of the individual metasurfaces to calculate the response of an arbitrary stack. In fact, the S-parameters are the complex parameters of choice fully characterizing the homogeneous metasurfaces, in particular with respect to its polarization manipulating properties. Just as effective material parameters like the permittivity and the permeability or wave parameters like the propagation constant and the impedance, the stacking based upon S-matrices can be applied as long as the individual layers are decoupled with respect to their near-fields. This requirement eventually sets the limits for using the optical properties of the individual layers to calculate the response of the stacked system - this being the conceptual aim for any homogeneous metasurface or metamaterial layer and therefore the essence of what is eventually possible with homogeneous metasurfaces. As simple and appealing this approach is, as powerful it is as well: Combining structured metasurface with each other as well as with isotropic, anisotropic or chiral homogeneous layers is possible by simple semi-analytical S-matrix multiplication. Hence, complex stacks and resonators can be set up, accurately treated and optimized with respect to their dispersive polarization sensitive optical functionality without the need for further rigorous full-wave simulations.
The nonlinear optical response of materials to exciting light is enhanced by resonances between the incident laser frequencies and the energy levels of the excited material. Traditionally, in molecular nonlinear spectroscopy one tunes the input laser frequencies to the molecular energy levels for highly enhanced doubly or triply resonant interactions. With metasurfaces the situation is different, and by proper design of the nanostructures, one may tune the material energy levels to match the incoming laser frequencies. Here we use multi-parameter genetic algorithm methodologies to optimize the nonlinear Four Wave Mixing response, and show that the intuitive conventional approach of trying to match the transmission spectrum to the relevant laser frequencies indeed leads to strong enhancement, but not necessarily to the optimal design. We demonstrate, experimentally and by direct nonlinear field calculations, that the near field mode distribution and spatial modes overlap are the dominant factor for optimized design.
Metasurfaces in metal/insulator/metal configuration have recently been widely used in photonics research, with applications ranging from perfect absorption to phase modulation, but why and when such structures can realize what kind of functionalities are not yet fully understood. Here, based on a coupled-mode theory analysis, we establish a complete phase diagram in which the optical properties of such systems are fully controlled by two simple parameters (i.e., the intrinsic and radiation losses), which are in turn dictated by the geometrical/material parameters of the underlying structures. Such a phase diagram can greatly facilitate the design of appropriate metasurfaces with tailored functionalities (e.g., perfect absorption, phase modulator, electric/magnetic reflector, etc.), demonstrated by our experiments and simulations in the Terahertz regime. In particular, our experiments show that, through appropriate structural/material tuning, the device can be switched across the functionality phase boundaries yielding dramatic changes in optical responses. Our discoveries lay a solid basis for realizing functional and tunable photonic devices with such structures.
Metasurfaces are optically thin metamaterials that promise complete control of the wavefront of light but are primarily used to control only the phase of light. Here, we present an approach, simple in concept and in practice, that uses meta-atoms with a varying degree of form birefringence and rotation angles to create high-efficiency dielectric metasurfaces that control both the optical amplitude and phase at one or two frequencies. This opens up applications in computer-generated holography, allowing faithful reproduction of both the phase and amplitude of a target holographic scene without the iterative algorithms required in phase-only holography. We demonstrate all-dielectric metasurface holograms with independent and complete control of the amplitude and phase at up to two optical frequencies simultaneously to generate two- and three-dimensional holographic objects. We show that phase-amplitude metasurfaces enable a few features not attainable in phase-only holography; these include creating artifact-free two-dimensional holographic images, encoding phase and amplitude profiles separately at the object plane, encoding intensity profiles at the metasurface and object planes separately, and controlling the surface textures of three-dimensional holographic objects.
We demonstrate in this work that the use of metasurfaces provides a viable strategy to largely tune and enhance near-field radiative heat transfer between extended structures. In particular, using a rigorous coupled wave analysis, we predict that Si-based metasurfaces featuring two-dimensional periodic arrays of holes can exhibit a room-temperature near-field radiative heat conductance much larger than any unstructured material to date. We show that this enhancement, which takes place in a broad range of separations, relies on the possibility to largely tune the properties of the surface plasmon polaritons that dominate the radiative heat transfer in the near-field regime.
Analog computing has emerged as a promising candidate for real-time and parallel continuous data processing. This paper presents a reciprocal way for realizing asymmetric optical transfer functions (OTFs) in the reflection side of the on-axis processing channels. It is rigorously demonstrated that the presence of Cross-polarization Exciting Normal Polarizabilities (CPENP) of a reciprocal metasurface circumvents the famous challenge of Greens function approach in implementation of on-axis reflective optical signal processing while providing dual computing channels under orthogonal polarizations. Following a comprehensive theoretical discussion and as a proof of concept, an all-dielectric optical metasurface is elaborately designed to exhibit the desired surface polarizabilities, thereby reflecting the first derivative and extracting the edges of images impinging from normal direction. The proposed study offers a flexible design method for on-axis metasurface-based optical signal processing and also, dramatically facilitates the experimental setup required for ultrafast analog computation and image processing.