Nanophotonics (May 2022)

Designing high-efficiency extended depth-of-focus metalens via topology-shape optimization

  • Zheng Yuhan,
  • Xu Mingfeng,
  • Pu Mingbo,
  • Zhang Fei,
  • Sang Di,
  • Guo Yinghui,
  • Li Xiong,
  • Ma Xiaoliang,
  • Luo Xiangang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2022-0183
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 12
pp. 2967 – 2975

Abstract

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Longitudinal optical field modulation is of critical importance in a wide range of applications, including optical imaging, spectroscopy, and optical manipulation. However, it remains a considerable challenge to realize a uniformly distributed light field with extended depth-of-focus. Here, a high-efficiency extended depth-of-focus metalens is proposed by adjoint-based topology-shape optimization approach, wherein the theoretical electric field intensity corresponding to a variable focal-length phase is utilized as the figure of merit. Using a dozen of metalens with random structure parameters as initial structures, the average focal depth of topology-shape optimized metalens is greatly improved up to 18.80 μm (about 29.7λ), which is 1.54 times higher than the diffraction-limited focal depth. Moreover, all the topology-shape optimized metalens exhibit high diffraction efficiency exceeding 0.7 over the whole focal depth range, which is approximately three times greater than that of the forward design. Our results offer a new insight into the design of extended depth-of-focus metalens and may find potential applications in imaging, holography, and optical fabrication.

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