Abstract
Abstract Airy beams exhibit intriguing properties such as nonspreading, self-bending, and self-healing and have attracted considerable recent interest because of their many potential applications in photonics, such as to beam focusing, light-sheet microscopy, and biomedical imaging. However, previous approaches to generate Airy beams using photonic structures have suffered from severe chromatic problems arising from strong frequency dispersion of the scatterers. Here, we design and fabricate a metasurface composed of silicon posts for the frequency range 0.4–0.8 THz in transmission mode, and we experimentally demonstrate achromatic Airy beams exhibiting autofocusing properties. We further show numerically that a generated achromatic Airy-beam-based metalens exhibits self-healing properties that are immune to scattering by particles and that it also possesses a larger depth of focus than a traditional metalens. Our results pave the way to the realization of flat photonic devices for applications to noninvasive biomedical imaging and light-sheet microscopy, and we provide a numerical demonstration of a device protocol.
Highlights
As a nontrivial solution of the paraxial equation of light [1], an Airy beam exhibits many remarkable features, such as self-bending, nonspreading, and self-healing after diffractions by obstacles [2,3,4,5,6,7]
Our results pave the way to the realization of flat photonic devices for applications to noninvasive biomedical imaging and light-sheet microscopy, and we provide a numerical demonstration of a device protocol
The transmitted left circular polarization (LCP) THz intensities in the x–z plane fit the parabolic trajectory f (z) for the right circular polarization (RCP) incident light. (b) To determine the phase distribution φ(x, f ) of the metasurface under design, we draw an auxiliary line tangent to the parabolic asymptotical trajectory f (z) of the desired Airy beam at an arbitrary point, which intersects with x axis exhibiting an angle θ
Summary
As a nontrivial solution of the paraxial equation of light [1], an Airy beam exhibits many remarkable features, such as self-bending (even in the absence of any external potential field), nonspreading, and self-healing after diffractions by obstacles [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Plasmonic Airy beams [19, 21, 22] have been successfully generated on metallic surfaces on which are placed nanoscatterers that have been carefully designed to convert impinging light to surface plasmon waves with the desired amplitudes and phases. These devices are compact and exhibit improved spatial resolution, the
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