Subwavelength-thick lenses with high numerical apertures and large efficiency based on high-contrast transmitarrays

By Amir Arbabi, Y. Horie, A. Ball, M. Bagheri, A. Faraon. Nature Communications, 2014

999 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Flat optical devices thinner than a wavelength promise to replace conventional free-space components for wavefront and polarization control. Transmissive flat lenses are particularly interesting for applications in imaging and on-chip optoelectronic integration. Several designs based on plasmonic metasurfaces, high-contrast transmitarrays and gratings have been recently implemented but have not provided a performance comparable to conventional curved lenses. Here we report polarization-insensitive, micron-thick, high-contrast transmitarray micro-lenses with focal spots as small as 0.57 λ. The measured focusing efficiency is up to 82%. A rigorous method for ultrathin lens design, and the trade-off between high efficiency and small spot size (or large numerical aperture) are discussed. The micro-lenses, composed of silicon nano-posts on glass, are fabricated in one lithographic step that could be performed with high-throughput photo or nanoimprint lithography, thus enabling widespread adoption. Replacing conventional components with flat optic devices such as flat lenses is desirable for imaging and on-chip integration, but performance has hindered their use. Here, Arbabi et al. report a wavelength-thin, high-contrast transmitarray micro-lens with a 0.57 λfocal spot and 82% focusing efficiency.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13798f459755bccfc022cd2b2c1e6c75c2126235

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In Aerospace Engineering

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Surfaces, Coatings and Films

Citations in the corpus

Miniature optical planar camera based on a wide-angle metasurface doublet corrected for monochromatic aberrations (2016, methodology): “The metasurface-enabled camera we reported here has a flat and thin form factor, small f-number, and exhibits nearly diffraction limited performance over a large field of view.”