Design of an all-silicon long-wave infrared meta spiral zone plate

Abstract

Traditional infrared lenses cannot meet the requirements of planarization and lightweight of infrared optical systems due to their large volume and mass. An infrared metasurface with almost zero thickness can control the incident beam’s amplitude, phase and polarization arbitrarily, which make it possible to circumvent these limitations. However, no metasurface has been designed to realize sub-diffraction focusing in the long-wave infrared band. In this article, a longwave infrared meta spiral zone plate (LWIR-MSZP) is designed, which converts the incident linearly polarized beam to an azimuthally polarized beam and focuses the latter into a sub-diffraction solid spot. The designed LWIR-MSZP works at a wavelength of 10.6 μm and has a diameter of 480 μm and numerical aperture (NA) of 0.8. The simulated full width at half maximum (FWHM) and depth of focus (DOF) of the focal spot are 0.6λ and 2.24λ, respectively. The simulated efficiency is 24.04%. The proposed design procedure greatly simplifies the long-wave infrared sub-diffractive focusing optical system and complements the technical gap to achieve sub-diffractive focusing in long-wave infrared using a metasurface. To make it further, the all-silicon meta-atom employed in this work has the advantage of low cost once semiconductor fabrication techniques are introduced. We believe that this result can be applied to the related fields of super-resolution imaging and laser processing in long-wave infrared band.