Simulation for multiwavelength large-aperture all-silicon metalenses in long-wave infrared

Abstract

Abstract Long-wave infrared imaging systems are widely used in the field of environmental monitoring and imaging guidance. As the core components, the long-wave infrared lenses suffer the conditions of less available materials, difficult processing, large volume and mass. Metalens composed of sub-wavelength structures is one of the most potential candidates to achieve a lightweight and planar optical imaging systems. Meanwhile, it is essential to obtain large-aperture infrared lenses with high power and high resolution. However, it is difficult to use the finite-difference time-domain method to simulate a large-aperture metalens with the diameter of 201 mm due to the large amount of computational memory and computational time required. Here, to solve the mentioned problem, we firstly propose a simulation method for designing a large-aperture metalens, which combines the finite-difference time-domain algorithm and diffraction integration. The finite-difference time-domain algorithm is used to simulate the meta-atom’s transmitted complex amplitude and the one-dimensional simplification of the diffraction integral is to calculate the focused field distributions of the designed metalens. Furthermore, the meta-atom spatial multiplexing is applied to design the all-silicon metalenses with the aperture of 201 mm to realize dual-wavelength (10 and 11 μm) achromatic focusing, super anomalous dispersion focusing and super normal dispersion focusing. The designed metalenses are numerically confirmed, which reveal the feasibility of all-silicon sub-wavelength structures to accomplish the multiwavelength dispersion control. The designed all-silicon metalenses have the advantage of lightweight and compact. The proposed method is effective for the development of large-aperture imaging systems in the long-wave infrared.