High-efficiency generation of far-field spin-polarized wavefronts via designer surface wave metasurfaces

Abstract

Achieving a pre-designed scattering pattern from an ultra-compact platform is highly desired for on-chip integration optics, but conventional techniques suffer from the limitations of bulky size, wavelength-scale modulation and low efficiency. Here, we propose a new strategy to efficiently generate arbitrary spin-polarized scattering far-field patterns from surface-wave (SW) excitations on a designer Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) metasurface. We find that a PB meta-atom serves as a subwavelength scatter to decouple impinging SW to a spin-polarized propagating wave (PW) with tailored amplitude and phase, and thus interference among PWs generated by scatterings at different PB meta-atoms can generate a tailored far-field pattern. As a proof of concept, we design and fabricate a series of PB metasurfaces in the microwave regime and experimentally demonstrate that they can generate desired radiation patterns within a broad frequency band, including unidirectional radiation, line/point focusing, vortex beam and hologram. These findings may stimulate important applications in on-chip integrated photonics.

Keywords

• far-field wavefront
• metasurface
• pancharatnam–berry phase
• propagation wave
• surface wave