RESUMEN
Optical metasurfaces with subwavelength thickness hold considerable promise for future advances in fundamental optics and novel optical applications due to their unprecedented ability to control the phase, amplitude, and polarization of transmitted, reflected, and diffracted light. Introducing active functionalities to optical metasurfaces is an essential step to the development of next-generation flat optical components and devices. During the last few years, many attempts have been made to develop tunable optical metasurfaces with dynamic control of optical properties (e.g., amplitude, phase, polarization, spatial/spectral/temporal responses) and early-stage device functions (e.g., beam steering, tunable focusing, tunable color filters/absorber, dynamic hologram, etc) based on a variety of novel active materials and tunable mechanisms. These recently-developed active metasurfaces show significant promise for practical applications, but significant challenges still remain. In this review, a comprehensive overview of recently-reported tunable metasurfaces is provided which focuses on the ten major tunable metasurface mechanisms. For each type of mechanism, the performance metrics on the reported tunable metasurface are outlined, and the capabilities/limitations of each mechanism and its potential for various photonic applications are compared and summarized. This review concludes with discussion of several prospective applications, emerging technologies, and research directions based on the use of tunable optical metasurfaces. We anticipate significant new advances when the tunable mechanisms are further developed in the coming years.
RESUMEN
Nonlinear optical response could be greatly enhanced when metasurfaces support plasmonic resonances at both fundamental and harmonic wavelengths. However, it is still challenging to fulfill the doubly resonant condition. Here, we propose a dielectric-loading method, which simply coats a conformal thin dielectric layer onto the plasmonic metasurfaces, to introduce an additional degree of freedom and make the doubly resonant condition easily fulfilled. We demonstrate that by simultaneously tuning the thickness of the coated dielectric layer and the geometrical parameters of the gold complementary split-ring resonators (CSRRs), the doubly resonant enhancement of third harmonic generation (THG) could be achieved for any given fundamental wavelengths. We also experimentally verify this concept and show that the THG intensity in the dielectric-loaded CSRRs under the doubly resonant condition could be further increased about 3 times as compared with the case of the conventional CSRRs.
RESUMEN
Enhancing the efficiency of second-harmonic generation using all-dielectric metasurfaces to date has mostly focused on electromagnetic engineering of optical modes in the meta-atom. Further advances in nonlinear conversion efficiencies can be gained by engineering the material nonlinearities at the nanoscale, however this cannot be achieved using conventional materials. Semiconductor heterostructures that support resonant nonlinearities using quantum engineered intersubband transitions can provide this new degree of freedom. By simultaneously optimizing the heterostructures and meta-atoms, we experimentally realize an all-dielectric polaritonic metasurface with a maximum second-harmonic generation power conversion factor of 0.5 mW/W2 and power conversion efficiencies of 0.015% at nominal pump intensities of 11 kW/cm2. These conversion efficiencies are higher than the record values reported to date in all-dielectric nonlinear metasurfaces but with 3 orders of magnitude lower pump power. Our results therefore open a new direction for designing efficient nonlinear all-dielectric metasurfaces for new classical and quantum light sources.
RESUMEN
All-dielectric optical metasurfaces are a workhorse in nano-optics, because of both their ability to manipulate light in different degrees of freedom and their excellent performance at light frequency conversion. Here, we demonstrate first-time generation of photon pairs via spontaneous parametric-down conversion in lithium niobate quantum optical metasurfaces with electric and magnetic Mie-like resonances at various wavelengths. By engineering the quantum optical metasurface, we tailor the photon-pair spectrum in a controlled way. Within a narrow bandwidth around the resonance, the rate of pair production is enhanced up to 2 orders of magnitude, compared to an unpatterned film of the same thickness and material. These results enable flat-optics sources of entangled photons-a new promising platform for quantum optics experiments.
RESUMEN
Lithium niobate is an excellent and widely used material for nonlinear frequency conversion due to its strong optical nonlinearity and broad transparency region. Here, we report the fabrication and experimental investigation of resonant nonlinear metasurfaces for second-harmonic generation based on thin-film lithium niobate. In the fabricated metasurfaces, we observe pronounced Mie-type resonances leading to enhanced second-harmonic generation in the direction normal to the metasurface. We find the largest second-harmonic generation efficiency for the resonance dominated by the electric contributions because its specific field distribution enables the most efficient usage of the largest element of the lithium niobate nonlinear susceptibility tensor. This is confirmed by polarization-resolved second-harmonic measurements, where we study contributions from different elements of the nonlinear susceptibility tensor to the total second-harmonic signal. Our work facilitates establishing lithium niobate as a material for resonant nanophotonics.
RESUMEN
In linear optics, the metasurface represents an ideal platform for encoding optical information because of its unprecedented abilities of manipulating the intensity, polarization, and phase of light wave with subwavelength meta-atoms. However, controlling various degrees of freedom of light in nonlinear optics remains elusive. Here, we propose a nonlinear plasmonic metasurface working in the near-infrared regime that can simultaneously encode optical images in the real and Fourier spaces. This is achieved by designing a diatomic meta-molecule, which enables the independent control of the nonlinear geometric phase, polarization, and intensity of second harmonic waves. The proposed nonlinear diatomic metasurface provides an ultracompact platform for implementing multidimensional optical information encoding and may hold great potential in optical information security and optical anticounterfeiting.
RESUMEN
Nonlinear frequency conversion at the nanoscale is important for many applications in free space and integrated photonics. In epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials, second-harmonic generation (SHG) is significantly enhanced but the oblique incidence is required to address nonlinearity. To circumvent this constraint, we design a hybrid metasurface consisting of plasmonic nanostructures on an ENZ nanofilm generating strongly enhanced SHG at normal incidence in transmission. We show that the Au meta-atoms on an indium-tin-oxide (ITO) layer provide an approximately 104-fold experimentally measured SHG enhancement at normal incidence at the fundamental wavelength near the ENZ condition of ITO. This giant enhancement stems from reshaping the vectorial properties of the incident light near the Au nanostructures and its increased coupling to the ENZ film. The proposed hybrid ENZ metasurface offers a promising platform for developing ultracompact and efficient nonlinear optical sources at the nanoscale.
RESUMEN
Photonic metasurfaces, a kind of 2D structured medium, represent a novel platform to manipulate the propagation of light at subwavelength scale. In linear optical regime, many interesting topics such as planar meta-lenses, metasurface optical holography, and so on have been widely investigated. Recently, metasurfaces have gone into the nonlinear optical regime. While it is recognized that the local symmetry of the meta-atoms plays a vital role in determining the polarization, phase, and intensity of the nonlinear waves, much less attention has been paid to the global symmetry of the nonlinear metasurfaces. According to the Penrose tiling and the newly proposed hexagonal quasicrystalline tiling, nonlinear optical quasicrystal metasurfaces are designed and fabricated based on the geometric-phase-controlled plasmonic meta-atoms with local rotational symmetry. It is found that the far-field radiation behavior of second harmonic generation waves are determined by both the tiling schemes of quasicrystal metasurfaces and the local symmetry of meta-atoms they consist of. The proposed concept may open new avenues for designing nonlinear optical sources with metasurface crystals.