Volume 7, Issue 6 - Honorary issue for Federico Capasso on “Metamaterials & Metasurfaces”

Metasurfaces enable the redesign of optical components into thin, planar and multifunctional elements, promising a major reduction in footprint and system complexity as well as the introduction of new optical functions. The planarity of flat optics will lead to the unification of semiconductor manufacturing and lens-making, where the planar technology to manufacture computer chips will be adapted to make CMOS-compatible metasurface-based optical components, ranging from metalenses to novel polarization optics, areas where I foresee the greatest technological and scientific impact.

Optical metasurfaces are judicously engineered electromagnetic interfaces that can control and manipulate many of light’s quintessential properties, such as amplitude, phase, and polarization. These artificial surfaces are composed of subwavelength arrays of optical antennas that experience resonant light-matter interaction with incoming electromagnetic radiation. Their ability to arbitrarily engineer optical interactions has generated considerable excitement and interest in recent years and is a promising methodology for miniaturizing optical components for applications in optical communication systems, imaging, sensing, and optical manipulation. However, development of optical metasurfaces requires progress and solutions to inherent challenges, namely large losses often associated with the resonant structures; large-scale, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor-compatible nanofabrication techniques; and incorporation of active control elements. Furthermore, practical metasurface devices require robust operation in high-temperature environments, caustic chemicals, and intense electromagnetic fields. Although these challenges are substantial, optical metasurfaces remain in their infancy, and novel material platforms that offer resilient, low-loss, and tunable metasurface designs are driving new and promising routes for overcoming these hurdles. In this review, we discuss the different material platforms in the literature for various applications of metasurfaces, including refractory plasmonic materials, epitaxial noble metal, silicon, graphene, phase change materials, and metal oxides. We identify the key advantages of each material platform and review the breakthrough devices that were made possible with each material. Finally, we provide an outlook for emerging metasurface devices and the new material platforms that are enabling such devices.

Metasurfaces are a topic of significant research and are used in various applications due to their unique ability to manipulate electromagnetic waves in microwave and optical frequencies. These artificial sheet materials, which are usually composed of metallic patches or dielectric etchings in planar or multi-layer configurations with subwavelength thickness, have the advantages of light weight, ease of fabrication, and ability to control wave propagation both on the surface and in the surrounding free space. Recent progress in the field has been classified by application and reviewed in this article. Starting with the development of frequency-selective surfaces and metamaterials, the unique capabilities of different kinds of metasurfaces have been highlighted. Surface impedance can be varied and manipulated by patterning the metasurface unit cells, which has broad applications in surface wave absorbers and surface waveguides. They also enable beam shaping in both transmission and reflection. Another important application is to radiate in a leaky wave mode as an antenna. Other applications of metasurfaces include cloaking, polarizers, and modulators. The controllable surface refractive index provided by metasurfaces can also be applied to lenses. When active and non-linear components are added to traditional metasurfaces, exceptional tunability and switching ability are enabled. Finally, metasurfaces allow applications in new forms of imaging.

Metasurfaces are ultrathin structured surfaces that are capable of manipulating the propagation of light in an arbitrary manner. It has been endowed with various functionalities ranging from imaging to holography. In contrast to linear optical processes, the control of wave propagation and diffraction over nonlinear optical processes such as harmonic generations had been much more limited until recently, when the concept of metasurfaces was extended from linear optics to the nonlinear optical regime for manipulating the generation of harmonic signals in an unprecedented level. The key to this recent development lies in the local control over the phase and/or the amplitude of nonlinear polarizability. This new development has led to an array of interesting optical phenomena and nonlinear optical devices that went beyond what had been achieved with traditional nonlinear optical elements. In this review, we summarize the latest progress in controlling the local phase of nonlinearity with plasmonic metasurfaces, with a focus on nonlinear geometric Berry phase and wavefront engineering, and various device applications with nonlinear metasurfaces.

The field of metasurfaces is revolutionizing the way we control and manipulate light and electromagnetic fields based on engineered ultrathin structures. In this review article, we discuss the theory, modeling, and applications of metasurfaces, with particular focus on controlling the near-field response of sources close to the artificial surface. Although metasurfaces have attracted large attention for their ability to control and mold the wavefront of propagating waves, hence acting as flat lenses, they can also be used to modify the emission/radiation from near-field sources and control the generation and propagation of surface waves guided and confined along the surface. We discuss the analytical modeling of metasurfaces treated as homogenized impedance sheets and elucidate the application and limits of this approach for near-field sources. We devote a large part of the review article to anisotropic and hyperbolic metasurfaces, which enable some of the most exciting and extreme examples of anomalous surface-wave propagation on planarized artificial structures, with important implications for light focusing, confinement, and subwavelength imaging. We also connect these ideas with the emerging area of 2D materials and discuss how to implement hyperbolic metasurfaces with graphene and black phosphorus. We hope that this review article may provide the reader with relevant physical insights and useful analytical tools to study metasurfaces and their near-field interactions with localized sources and, more generally, offer an overview of this field and its ambitious goal of ideal light control on a surface.

During the past few years, metasurfaces have been used to demonstrate optical elements and systems with capabilities that surpass those of conventional diffractive optics. Here, we review some of these recent developments, with a focus on dielectric structures for shaping optical wavefronts. We discuss the mechanisms for achieving steep phase gradients with high efficiency, simultaneous polarization and phase control, controlling the chromatic dispersion, and controlling the angular response. Then, we review applications in imaging, conformal optics, tunable devices, and optical systems. We conclude with an outlook on future potentials and challenges that need to be overcome.

Metasurfaces as optically thin composite layers can be modeled as electric and magnetic surface current sheets flowing in the layer volume in the metasurface plane. In the most general linear metasurface, the electric surface current can be induced by both incident electric and magnetic fields. Likewise, magnetic polarization and magnetic current can be induced also by external electric field. Metasurfaces which exhibit magnetoelectric coupling are called bianisotropic metasurfaces. In this review, we explain the role of bianisotropic properties in realizing various metasurface devices and overview the state-of-the-art of research in this field. Interestingly, engineered bianisotropic response is seen to be required for realization of many key field transformations, such as anomalous refraction, asymmetric reflection, polarization transformation, isolation, and more. Moreover, we summarize previously reported findings on uniform and gradient bianisotropic metasurfaces and envision novel and prospective research directions in this field.

The paper overviews our recent work on the synthesis of metasurfaces and related concepts and applications. The synthesis is based on generalized sheet transition conditions (GSTCs) with a bianisotropic surface susceptibility tensor model of the metasurface structure. We first place metasurfaces in a proper historical context and describe the GSTC technique with some fundamental susceptibility tensor considerations. On this basis, we next provide an in-depth development of our susceptibility-GSTC synthesis technique. Finally, we present five recent metasurface concepts and applications, which cover the topics of birefringent transformations, bianisotropic refraction, light emission enhancement, remote spatial processing, and nonlinear second-harmonic generation.

The next generation of flat optic devices aspires to a dynamic control of the wavefront characteristics. Here, we theoretically investigated the reconfigurable capabilities of an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) metasurface augmented with resonant dielectric rods. We showed that the transmission spectrum of the metasurface is characterized by a Fano-like resonance, where the metasurface behavior changed from perfect magnetic conductor to epsilon-and-mu-near-zero material responses. The abrupt variation between these two extreme material responses suggests potential applications in dynamic metasurfaces. We highlighted the causality aspects of ENZ metasurfaces with a transient analysis and numerically investigated different reconfigurable mechanisms. Thus, this work introduces a new strategy for dynamic wavefront engineering.

Plasmonic metasurfaces, which can be considered as the two-dimensional analog of metal-based metamaterials, have attracted progressively increasing attention in recent years because of the ease of fabrication and unprecedented control over the reflected or transmitted light while featuring relatively low losses even at optical wavelengths. Among all the different design approaches, gap-surface plasmon metasurfaces – a specific branch of plasmonic metasurfaces – which consist of a subwavelength thin dielectric spacer sandwiched between an optically thick metal film and arrays of metal subwavelength elements arranged in a strictly or quasi-periodic fashion, have gained awareness from researchers working at practically any frequency regime as its realization only requires a single lithographic step, yet with the possibility to fully control the amplitude, phase, and polarization of the reflected light. In this paper, we review the fundamentals, recent developments, and opportunities of gap-surface plasmon metasurfaces. Starting with introducing the concept of gap-surface plasmon metasurfaces, we present three typical gap-surface plasmon resonators, introduce generalized Snell’s law, and explain the concept of Pancharatnam-Berry phase. We then overview the main applications of gap-surface plasmon metasurfaces, including beam-steerers, flat lenses, holograms, absorbers, color printing, polarization control, surface wave couplers, and dynamically reconfigurable metasurfaces. The review is ended with a short summary and outlook on possible future developments.

Metasurfaces and planar photonic crystals are two classes of subwavelength diffractive optical devices offering novel functionalities. The former employ independently operating subwavelength “meta-units” as their building blocks, while the latter exploit the collective response of many periodic building blocks. High contrast gratings (HCGs) are an example of one-dimensional (1D) planar photonic crystals with large refractive index contrast, exhibiting large in-plane scattering even with a limited number of grating periods. They are best known for their broadband features. Low contrast gratings (LCGs) are known for their control over sharp spectral features but require many periods due to small in-plane scattering. We explore a class of symmetry-broken HCGs called dimerized high contrast gratings (DHCGs), which have a period-doubling perturbation applied. DHCGs support modes accessible by free-space illumination with a long, controllable photon lifetime (inversely proportional to the magnitude of the perturbation) and reduced lateral energy divergence (confined by the high index contrast of the grating). We catalogue and clarify the resonant modes introduced by the dimerizing perturbation in 1D DHCGs and briefly explore the increased in-plane scattering present in two-dimensional (2D) DHCGs. We introduce an approach maximizing lateral localization by band structure engineering in the unperturbed HCG and using the dimerizing perturbation to generate sharp spectral features in devices with small footprint. We confirm the simultaneous control of photon lifetime and lateral localization with full-wave simulations of finite-sized DHCGs. We conclude by numerically demonstrating two compact devices (an optical modulator and a refractive index sensor) benefitting from the unique design freedoms of DHCGs.

Holography has emerged as a vital approach to fully engineer the wavefronts of light since its invention dating back to the last century. However, the typically large pixel size, small field of view and limited space-bandwidth impose limitations in the on-demand high-performance applications, especially for three-dimensional displays and large-capacity data storage. Meanwhile, metasurfaces have shown great potential in controlling the propagation of light through the well-tailored scattering behavior of the constituent ultrathin planar elements with a high spatial resolution, making them suitable for holographic beam-shaping elements. Here, we review recent developments in the field of metasurface holography, from the classification of metasurfaces to the design strategies for both free-space and surface waves. By employing the concepts of holographic multiplexing, multiple information channels, such as wavelength, polarization state, spatial position and nonlinear frequency conversion, can be employed using metasurfaces. Meanwhile, the switchable metasurface holography by the integration of functional materials stimulates a gradual transition from passive to active elements. Importantly, the holography principle has become a universal and simple approach to solving inverse engineering problems for electromagnetic waves, thus allowing various related techniques to be achieved.

Molding the wavefront of acoustic waves into the desired shape is of paramount significance in acoustics, which however are usually constrained by the acoustical response of naturally available materials. The emergence of acoustic metamaterials built by assembling artificial subwavelength elements provides distinct response to acoustic waves unattainable in nature. More recently, acoustic metasurfaces, a class of metamaterials with a reduced dimensionality, empower new physics and lead to extended functionalities different from their three-dimensional counterparts, enabling controlling, transmitted or reflected acoustic waves in ways that were not possible before. In this review paper, we present a comprehensive view of this rapidly growing research field by introducing the basic concepts of acoustic metasurfaces and the recent developments that have occurred over the past few years. We review the interesting properties of acoustic metasurfaces and their important functionalities of wavefront manipulation, followed by an outlook for promising future directions and potential practical applications.

In this article, the basic principles and the main applications of Huygens’ metasurfaces (HMSs) are reviewed from microwaves to optics. In general, HMSs comprise a thin layer of orthogonal electric and magnetic dipoles, which form an array of Huygens’ sources. In a refraction setting, these sources radiate mostly in the forward direction and can be used to manipulate an incident electromagnetic wave at will. In the case of passive HMSs, the Huygens’ sources are induced by an incident electromagnetic field. Examples of passive manipulations include reflectionless refraction, perfect anomalous reflection, and arbitrary antenna beam forming. In the case of active HMSs, the Huygens’ sources are impressed active sources. Active HMS manipulations include cloaking and subwavelength spot formation in a cavity environment.

Metasurfaces are optically thin layers of subwavelength resonators that locally tailor the electromagnetic response at the nanoscale. Our metasurface research aims at developing novel designs and applications of metasurfaces that go beyond the classical regimes. In contrast to conventional phase gradient metasurfaces where each meta-atom responds individually, we are interested in developing metasurfaces where neighboring meta-atoms are strongly coupled. By engineering a non-Hermitian coupling between the meta-atoms, new degrees of freedom are introduced and novel functionalities can be achieved. We are also interested in combining classical metasurface with quantum emitters, which may offer opportunities for on-chip quantum technologies. Additionally, we have been designing metasurfaces to realize exciting phenomena and applications, such as ultrathin metasurface cloak and strong photonic spin-Hall effect. In this paper, we review our research efforts in optical metasurfaces in the past few years, which ranges from conventional to novel type of metasurface and from classical to quantum regime.