MEMS-tunable dielectric metasurface lens

By E. Arbabi, Amir Arbabi, Seyedeh Mahsa Kamali, Y. Horie, Mohammadsadegh Faraji-Dana, A. Faraon. Nature Communications, 2017

685 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Varifocal lenses, conventionally implemented by changing the axial distance between multiple optical elements, have a wide range of applications in imaging and optical beam scanning. The use of conventional bulky refractive elements makes these varifocal lenses large, slow, and limits their tunability. Metasurfaces, a new category of lithographically defined diffractive devices, enable thin and lightweight optical elements with precisely engineered phase profiles. Here we demonstrate tunable metasurface doublets, based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), with more than 60 diopters (about 4%) change in the optical power upon a 1-μm movement of one metasurface, and a scanning frequency that can potentially reach a few kHz. They can also be integrated with a third metasurface to make compact microscopes (~1 mm thick) with a large corrected field of view (~500 μm or 40 degrees) and fast axial scanning for 3D imaging. This paves the way towards MEMS-integrated metasurfaces as a platform for tunable and reconfigurable optics. Conventional refractive elements are bulky, thick and offer limited active tunability. Here, the authors demonstrate MEMS-based tunable metasurface doublets with more than 60 diopters change in the optical power upon a 1-micron movement of a membrane with one of the metasurface elements.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5cfda13091ffc06608d83ad5ce1cf30e110c1f4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Tunable metasurfaces towards versatile metalenses and metaholograms: a review (2022, background): “illustration of MEMS tunable metalenses in which the focal length is tuned by controlling the distance between two lenses.(99) (f) Schematic illustration of varifocal metalenses in which the focal length is tuned by exploiting the phase change of GSST by furnace annealing.”
Reconfigurable metasurfaces towards commercial success (2022, background): “…Stark effect 11 , thermo-optic coupling 12 , electrochromism 13 , magneto-optical interaction 14 , and structural transitions in various materials 15 – 18 , whereas the latter can leverage either macroscopic displacement 19 /deformation 20 or micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) actuation 21 (Fig.”
Spatiotemporal light control with active metasurfaces (2019, methodology): “In a different implementation, varifocal lenses operating in the visible regime have been implemented by using metasurface doublets with a MEMS controllable antenna spacing (19).”
Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Efficient Holographic MIMO Communications in 6G (2023, neutral): “Remark 2: In order to maximize the energy efficiency and characterize the performance of SIM-aided HMIMO communications, we have applied the constant modulus constraint and assumed continuously-adjustable phase shifts for the transmission coefficients associated with each metaatom [50].”