Abstract
Metasurfaces, as a two-dimensional (2D) version of metamaterials, have drawn considerable attention for their revolutionary capability in manipulating the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light. As one of the most important types of metasurfaces, geometric metasurfaces provide a versatile platform for controlling optical phase distributions due to the geometric nature of the generated phase profile. However, it remains a great challenge to design geometric metasurfaces for realizing spin-switchable functionalities because the generated phase profile with the converted spin is reversed once the handedness of the incident beam is switched. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate chiral geometric metasurfaces based on intrinsically chiral plasmonic stepped nanoapertures with a simultaneously high circular dichroism in transmission (CDT) and large cross-polarization ratio (CPR) in transmitted light to exhibit spin-controlled wavefront shaping capabilities. The chiral geometric metasurfaces are constructed by merging two independently designed subarrays of the two enantiomers for the stepped nanoaperture. Under a certain incident handedness, the transmission from one subarray is allowed, while the transmission from the other subarray is strongly prohibited. The merged metasurface then only exhibits the transmitted signal with the phase profile of one subarray, which can be switched by changing the incident handedness. Based on the chiral geometric metasurface, both chiral metasurface holograms and the spin-dependent generation of hybrid-order Poincaré sphere beams are experimentally realized. Our approach promises further applications in spin-controlled metasurface devices for complex beam conversion, image processing, optical trapping, and optical communications.
Recommended Citation
Y. Chen et al., "Spin-Controlled Wavefront Shaping with Plasmonic Chiral Geometric Metasurfaces," Light: Science and Applications, vol. 7, no. 1, Springer Nature, Dec 2018.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-018-0086-x
Department(s)
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Research Center/Lab(s)
Intelligent Systems Center
Keywords and Phrases
Dichroism; Holograms; Image processing; Optical communication; Optical data processing; Plasmonics; Plasmons; Polarization; Wavefronts
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
2047-7538
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2018 The Authors, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
01 Dec 2018
Comments
The authors acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECCS-1653032 and DMR-1552871 and the Office of Naval Research under Grant No. N00014-16-1-2408. The authors thank the facility support from the Materials Research Center at Missouri S&T.