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Updated: Jan 25, 2026

Demonstration of Equal-Intensity Beam Generation by Dielectric Metasurfaces
Published on: June 7, 2019
Ultrafast optical pulse shaping using dielectric metasurfaces
Shawn Divitt1,2, Wenqi Zhu1,2, Cheng Zhang1,2
1National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA.
Abstract:
Advances in ultrafast lasers, chirped pulse amplifiers, and frequency comb technology require fundamentally new pulse-modulation strategies capable of supporting unprecedentedly large bandwidth and high peak power while maintaining high spectral resolution. We demonstrate how dielectric metasurfaces can be leveraged to shape the temporal profile of a near-infrared femtosecond pulse. Finely tailored pulse-shaping operations, including splitting, compression, chirping, and higher-order distortion, are achieved using a Fourier-transform setup embedding metasurfaces able to manipulate, simultaneously and independently, the amplitude and phase of the constituent frequency components of the pulse. Exploiting metasurfaces to manipulate the temporal characteristics of light expands their impact and opens new vistas in the field of ultrafast science and technology.
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