2017/11/20 by Alan She, Shuyan Zhang, Samuel Shian +2 · 2 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Fabrication #Lens (geology) #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Planar #Plasmonic and Surface Plasmon Research #Ranging #Semiconductor #Semiconductor device fabrication #Stepper #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #Wavelength #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1364/oe.26.001573
arxiv created 2017/11/20 · openalex created_date 2017/12/04 · openalex publication_date 2018/01/16 · arxiv updated 2018/02/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Optical components, such as lenses, have traditionally been made in the bulk form by shaping glass or other transparent materials. Recent advances in metasurfaces provide a new basis for recasting optical components into thin, planar elements, having similar or better performance using arrays of subwavelength-spaced optical phase-shifters. The technology required to mass produce them dates back to the mid-1990s, when the feature sizes of semiconductor manufacturing became considerably denser than the wavelength of light, advancing in stride with Moore's law. This provides the possibility of unifying two industries: semiconductor manufacturing and lens-making, whereby the same technology used to make computer chips is used to make optical components, such as lenses, based on metasurfaces. Using a scalable metasurface layout compression algorithm that exponentially reduces design file sizes (by 3 orders of magnitude for a centimeter diameter lens) and stepper photolithography, we show the design and fabrication of metasurface lenses (metalenses) with extremely large areas, up to centimeters in diameter and beyond. Using a single two-centimeter diameter near-infrared metalens less than a micron thick fabricated in this way, we experimentally implement the ideal thin lens equation, while demonstrating high-quality imaging and diffraction-limited focusing.