Efficient arbitrary polarized light focusing by silicon cross-shaped metaatoms

Abstract

Abstract The functionality of most of the metasurfaces that have been investigated so far, especially in illuminations with arbitrarily linearly polarized incident light, are restricted to x- or y-polarized incoming light. In particular, filtering out one of the two orthogonal polarizations of the incoming electromagnetic wave loses the incident light energy and limits the potential performance of the metasurface. In this study, by utilizing the cross-shaped silicon metaatoms that support the simultaneous excitation of electric and magnetic dipoles under the illumination of both x- and y- orthogonal polarizations, we overcome the polarization-restricted functionality of the metalenses. By selecting the metaatoms arrangement in the metalens structure, which follows the hyperbolic phase profiles for both x- and y-polarized incoming light waves at the same time, we obtain the light intensity distribution with the extended depth of focus (EDOF) or enhanced intensities at the focal spot with the focusing efficiency 65% for the numerical aperture of 0.7. Utilizing metaatoms with the ability to control the two orthogonal incoming polarizations develops a new methodology for using the full potential and intensity of the arbitrary polarized incoming light. The present design concept of metaatoms has several advantages that are not limited to metalenses alone but can be applied in all metasurfaces realized to have good efficiency. Finally, the proposed metalenses are suitable for imaging, optical tweezers and lithography applications, where subwavelength light intensity distributions with EDOF are the most desirable property.