Moitra, P., Xu, X., Maruthiyodan Veetil, R., Liang, X., Mass, T. W. W., Kuznetsov, A. I., & Paniagua-Domínguez, R. (2023). Electrically Tunable Reflective Metasurfaces with Continuous and Full-Phase Modulation for High-Efficiency Wavefront Control at Visible Frequencies. ACS Nano, 17(17), 16952–16959. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.3c04071
Abstract:
All-dielectric optical metasurfaces can locally control the amplitude and phase of light at the
nanoscale, enabling arbitrary wavefront shaping. However, the lack of post-fabrication tunability
has limited the true potential of metasurfaces for many applications. Here, we utilize a thin liquid
crystal (LC) layer as a tunable medium surrounding the metasurface to achieve a phase-only spatial
light modulator (SLM) with high reflection in the visible frequency, exhibiting an active and
continuous resonance tuning with associated 2π phase control and uncoupled amplitude. The reduced LC thickness facilitates achieving a small pixel size, strongly suppressing crosstalk among
pixels. Dynamic wavefront shaping is demonstrated by programming 96 individually addressable
electrodes with a pixel pitch of ~1 μm. This device is used to demonstrate dynamic beam steering
with a wide field of view and high absolute diffraction efficiencies. We believe that our
demonstration may pave the way towards realizing next-generation, high-resolution SLMs, with
wide applications in dynamic holography, tunable optics and light detection and ranging (LiDAR),
to mention a few.
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Funding Info:
This research / project is supported by the A*STAR - AME Programmatic
Grant Reference no. : A18A7b0058
This research / project is supported by the National Research Foundation - NRF Investigatorship
Grant Reference no. : NRF-NRFI2017-01