Metasurfaces with Planar Chiral Meta-Atoms for Spin Light Manipulation

Nano Lett. 2021 Feb 24;21(4):1815-1821. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.0c04902. Epub 2021 Feb 3.

Abstract

Spin light (i.e., circularly polarized light) manipulation based on metasurfaces with a controlled geometric phase (i.e., Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase) has achieved great successes according to its convenient design and robust performances, by which the phase control is mainly determined by the rotation angle of each meta-atom. This PB phase can be regarded as a global effect for spin light; here, we propose a local phase manipulation for metasurfaces with planar chiral meta-atoms. Planar chiral meta-atoms break fundamental symmetry restrictions and do not need a rotation for these kinds of meta-atoms to manipulate the spin light, which significantly expands the functionality of metasurface as it is incorporated with other modulations (e.g., PB phase, propagation phase). As an example, spin-decoupled holographic imaging is demonstrated with robust and broadband properties. Our work definitely enriches the design of metasurfaces and may trigger more exciting chiral-optics applications.

Keywords: Dielectric metasurfaces; chiral meta-atoms; meta-hologram; spin decoupling.