Freeform Mode-Engineered Metasurfaces

Nanophotonic technologies inherently rely on tailoring light-matter interactions through the excitation and interference of deeply confined optical resonances. However, existing concepts in optical mode engineering remain heuristic and are challenging to extend toward complex and multifunctional resonant phenomena. We introduce an inverse design framework that optimizes near-field distributions, ideally suited to tailoring Mie-type modes within dielectric nanophotonic structures, and we demonstrate its application to the discovery of new classes of nonlocal metasurfaces. We show that freeform nonlocal metasurfaces supporting accidental bound states in the continuum can be readily optimized for tailored illumination conditions, modal properties, and quality factors. We further generalize the framework to higher-order and multifunctional mode engineering and experimentally demonstrate freeform planar nonlocal multiwavelength and chiral metasurfaces. Our versatile framework for freeform mode engineering has applications in broad high-quality-factor nanophotonic platforms relevant to sensing, nonlinear optics, optomechanics, and quantum information processing.