Coherent control of high efficiency metasurface beam deflectors with a back partial reflector

Abstract

Recently, coherent control of absorption in metallic metasurfaces has been demonstrated, and this phenomenon was applied to intriguing light-by-light switching operation. Here we experimentally demonstrate coherent control of beam deflection by high-efficiency metasurfaces for the first time. Although the beam deflection efficiency by a metasurface is generally small, high-efficiency metasurfaces, which consist of a single layer metasurface with a back reflector, are known to exhibit significantly high deflection efficiency. A key point of our study is to replace the back reflector with a partial reflector instead, which enables light-by-light control of a high-efficiency metasurface with a pair of counter-propagating coherent beam inputs. By adjusting the partial reflector thickness appropriately, the proposed device outperforms ones without a reflector, especially for the deflection efficiency. We finally experimentally demonstrate the expected operation of the fabricated device at a visible wavelength, which reveals that the deflection efficiency of 45% (49% in theory). This result demonstrates highly efficient light-by-light control of the beam deflection by a metasurface, which opens up possible applications to ultrathin photonic devices for linear all-optical switching and logic functions.