Theoretical Design of a Bionic Spatial 3D-Arrayed Multifocal Metalens

Biomimetics (Basel). 2022 Nov 16;7(4):200. doi: 10.3390/biomimetics7040200.

Abstract

With the development of micro/nano-optics, metasurfaces are gaining increasing attention working as novel electromagnetic wave control devices. Among which, metalenses have been developed and applied as a typical application of metasurfaces owing to their unique optical properties. However, most of those previous metalenses can only produce one focal point, which severely limits their applications. Inspired by the fly compound eye, we propose a special kind of spatial multifocal metalens. Our metalenses can reverse the polarization state of the incident circularly polarized light, which is then focused. In addition, a horizontally aligned multifocal metalens can be achieved by designing reasonable phase and region distributions, which is similar to a vertically aligned one. Most significantly, a spatially 3D-arrayed multifocal metalens with low crosstalk is well achieved by combining these two distribution methods. The proposed bionic 3D-arrayed multifocal metalens with amazing focusing effect promises applications in imaging, nanoparticle manipulation, optical communication, and other fields.

Keywords: 3D-arrayed multifocal metalens; bionics; geometric phase; nanofin; polarization-dependent.