Design and analysis of extended depth of focus metalenses for achromatic computational imaging

Abstract

Metasurface optics have demonstrated vast potential for implementing traditional optical components in an ultracompact and lightweight form factor. Metasurfaces, however, suffer from severe chromatic aberrations, posing serious limitations on their practical use. Existing approaches for circumventing this involving dispersion engineering are limited to small apertures and often entail multiple scatterers per unit cell with small feature sizes. Here, we present an alternative technique to mitigate chromatic aberration and demonstrate high-quality, full-color imaging using extended depth of focus (EDOF) metalenses and computational reconstruction. Previous EDOF metalenses have relied on cubic phase masks, where the image quality suffers from asymmetric artefacts. Here we demonstrate the use of rotationally symmetric masks, including logarithmic-aspherical, and shifted axicon masks, to mitigate this problem. Our work will inspire further development in achromatic metalenses beyond dispersion engineering and hybrid optical–digital metasurface systems.