Elimination of reflection losses in gradient metasurface optical elements

Abstract

Optical metasurfaces can achieve arbitrary wavefront control using subwavelength nanostructures, enabling imaging, sensing, and display applications using ultrathin structures. Metasurface optical elements that rely on propagation phase achieve this control using varying fill fractions of high refractive index materials, resulting in surface regions with significantly different effective refractive index. The intrinsic need for index variation makes it a non-trivial task to eliminate reflection losses across a complete optical element. Here, we investigate the optical performance of high-index metasurfaces, modified to suppress surface reflections. We demonstrate that a drastic reduction of surface reflections across an entire gradient metasurface is possible through the application of a single optimized anti-reflective layer with a thickness and refractive index that are substantially different from the traditionally expected values.