• Opto-Electronic Engineering
  • Vol. 44, Issue 1, 114 (2017)
Min Wang, Kun Song, Jianyuan Wang, and Kexin Jin
Author Affiliations
  • School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China
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    DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1003-501x.2017.01.011 Cite this Article
    Min Wang, Kun Song, Jianyuan Wang, Kexin Jin. Splitting light beam by meanderline with continuous phase profile[J]. Opto-Electronic Engineering, 2017, 44(1): 114 Copy Citation Text show less

    Abstract

    The seminal study reported in 2011 demonstrated that arbitrary abrupt phase of scattering wave in 2π range can be realized by spatially tailoring the geometry of nanoantennas with deep-subwavelength sizes both in horizontal and vertical directions. Quite different from the traditional optics, the abrupt phase is generated from the resonance of the nanoantenna, rather than the accumulation of propagation in space or dielectric materials. Thereupon, metasurfaces composed of such nanoantennas can break the thickness limitation of traditional optical devices, with the advantage of flexible phase distribution arrangement, leading to a bright prospect in highly integrated nano-optical system. A lot of works have been reported that metasurfaces are ability of flexibly manipulating the wavefront of scattering, leading to applications of ultrathin flat metalenses, beam shaper, quarter-wave plates, optical holography, optical vortices generation, anomalous light bend etc. Although the metasurface is regarded as the alternative for the next generation optical device, how to improve the efficiency for the transmission light is still a challenge. Two approaches are generally used. One is to set the operation mode as reflection, i.e. the light source and the target light are on the same plane respect to the metasurface. Nanoantennas with high reflective coefficient are easier to be designed in comparison with high trans-mission coefficient, especially in metallic metasurfaces. The other way is to replace the host material as dielectric. Due to the low loss, ratio of the transmitted port of incoming light is weighted. The cost, however, is the increased profile. In popular, all the metasurfaces mentioned above are discrete, i.e. the neighbor nanoantennas are unconnected in physical configuration, yielding a phase profile of discontinuous. In this paper, we verify that structure of phase continuity can enhance the manipulation efficiency by suppressing high-order diffractions of nanoantennas. The sine-shaped metallic meanderline fabricated by focused ion beam technology converts circularly polarized (CP) light to its opposite handed-ness and sends it into different propagation directions depending on the polarization states in near-infrared and visible frequency regions. The beam splitting behavior is well characterized by a simple geometry relation, following the rule concluded from other works on the wavefront manipulation of metasurface with phase discontinuity. Importantly, the meanderline is demonstrated to be more efficient in realizing same functions due to the suppressed high order diffrac-tions resulted from the absence of interruption in phase profile. The theoretical efficiency reaches 67%. Particularly, po-tential improvements are feasible by changing or optimizing shape of the meanderline, offering high flexibility in appli-cations for optical imaging, communications and other phase-relative techniques. Additionally, since the continuous phase provided by the meanderline can improve the sampling efficiency of the phase function, it is helpful in realizing high quality hologram.
    Min Wang, Kun Song, Jianyuan Wang, Kexin Jin. Splitting light beam by meanderline with continuous phase profile[J]. Opto-Electronic Engineering, 2017, 44(1): 114
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