High‐Efficiency and Wide‐Angle Beam Steering Based on Catenary Optical Fields in Ultrathin Metalens

Abstract

AbstractRecent advances in artificial subwavelength structures promise the realization of ultrathin, lightweight, and flat metalens, providing a potential candidate for traditional bulky and curved lens. Nevertheless, most metalenses are generally suffering from serious off‐axis aberration, resulting in a limited field‐of‐view (FOV). Here, a methodology to extend the FOV of metalens is presented by exploring the local catenary optical fields and symmetry transformation from rotational symmetry to transversal symmetry. As a proof of the concept, a high efficiency (>80% even when the incidence angle is titled by 60°) and ultrathin (≈0.127 λ) metalens consisting of bilayer geometric metasurface is designed, fabricated, and characterized. The wide FOV of metalens benefiting from local catenary fields and symmetry transformation is numerically demonstrated by full‐wave simulation and ray tracing method. Moreover, the wide‐angle beam steering ability beyond ± 60° is experimentally demonstrated, which exhibits obvious advantages compared with previous beam steering transmitarrays. The novelty of the proposed methodology lies at the fact that both transversal and longitudinal local catenary fields are excited in a single component: the transversal catenary field is utilized for high efficiency spin–orbit interaction and phase modulation, while the longitudinal catenary field and symmetry transformation ensure wide‐angle operation.