Simultaneous implementation of antireflection and antitransmission through multipolar interference in plasmonic metasurfaces and applications in optical absorbers and broadband polarizers

Abstract

Metasurfaces have been widely used to control beam propagation e.g. transmission, reflection, and absorption on an interface through a thin layer of nanoantennas with the thickness smaller than the wavelength. However, previous study of metasurfaces typically focused on controlling only one form of these propagations. In this work, we propose and demonstrate a multipolar plasmonic metasurface that can simultaneously realize antireflection (AR) and antitransmission (AT) in the visible and near-infrared regions. The AR and AT arise from destructive multipolar interferences in the backward and forward directions, respectively, i.e., through the generalized Kerker effect. By engineering the multipolar interference, we show that the AR and AT can happen at different or similar wavelength ranges, which can be used for low-absorption spectral filters due to off-resonance operation or inversely strong optical absorbers through near-resonance operation, respectively. We also present a simple two-dimensional design of the multipolar metasurface that supports AT for one polarization and AR for another polarization over a broadband, which is applicable to broadband transmissive polarizers with efficiency over 90% and the extinction ratio over 18 dB. By tuning the dimension and thus the multipolar interference, the transmitted polarization and operation wavelength are both controllable.

Keywords

• antireflection
• antitransmission
• generalized kerker effect
• multipolar metasurface
• plasmonic metasurface