Polarization-insensitive and broad-angle gradient metasurface with high-efficiency anomalous reflection

Abstract

Polarization-insensitive metasurfaces are of great value in practical applications. In this paper, we present a polarization-insensitive reflective phase-gradient metasurface operating in optical communication band which has almost the same electromagnetic (EM) responses for both x-and y-polarized incident waves with high-efficiency anomalous reflection.The reflective metasurface employs a typical metal (Au)-insulator (SiO2)-metal (Au) structure, in which the top metal layer consists of periodic arrays of isotropic cross-shaped gold antennas, i.e. unit cells. The supercell of the metasurface is composed of five unit cells with their dimensions different from each other. The normally incident waves are reflected by the metal-grounded plane, but the reflection phases of both x-and y-polarized waves are controlled by changing the dimensions of their unit cells. Based on the finite-difference time-domain simulations, we investigate the polarization-dependent EM responses of this metasurface under the illumination of linearly polarized incident plane waves. Selecting carefully five cross-shaped gold antennas in different dimensions, we obtain polarization-insensitive metasurface with high-performance anomalous reflection in optical communication band.First, in order to investigate the polarization sensitivity of the proposed metasurface, we study the EM responses for x-and y-polarized incident waves, since arbitrary linearly-polarized EM waves can be separated into two orthogonally-polarized components. We find that the two orthogonally-polarized incident EM waves have almost the same phase and amplitude response with the phase nearly linearly changing from 0 to 2up within a supercell, hence a constant gradient of phase discontinuity is introduced and anomalous reflection will occur. We further analyze the reflected electric-field patterns and the far-field intensity distributions, from which we find that the reflected beams exhibit low-distortion wavefronts and the scattered light is predominantly reflected into the anomalous mode. As a consequence, high-efficiency anomalous reflection is realized, with a 70% reflectivity at the operating wavelength of 1480 nm. Furthermore, we look into the incident-angle dependence of the proposed metasurface, and find that the designed metasurface can exhibit polarization insensitivity within a broad incident angle ranging from -30 to 0.In conclusion, we propose a broad-angle polarization-insensitive reflective gradient metasurface with high-efficiency anomalous reflection, which has potential applications in optical communications, signal processing, displaying, imaging and other fields.