Polarization-independent highly efficient generation of Airy optical beams with dielectric metasurfaces

Abstract

Airy optical beams have emerged to hold enormous theoretical and experimental research interest due to their outstanding characteristics. Conventional approaches suffer from bulky and costly systems, as well as poor phase discretization. The newly developed metasurface-based Airy beam generators have constraints of polarization dependence or limited generation efficiency. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a polarization-independent silicon dielectric metasurface for generation of high-efficiency Airy optical beams. In our implementation, rather than synchronous manipulation of the amplitude and phase by plasmonic or Huygens’ metasurfaces, we employ and impose a 3/2 phase-only manipulation to the dielectric metasurface, consisting of an array of silicon nanopillars with an optimized transmission efficiency as high as 97%. The resultant Airy optical beams possess extraordinarily large deflection angles and relatively narrow beam widths. Our validated scheme will open up a fascinating doorway to broaden the application scenarios of Airy optical beams on ultracompact photonic platforms.