Disordered mosaic metasurfaces with scalable functional density

Area of Science:

• Photonics and Nanotechnology
• Optical Engineering
• Materials Science

Background:

• Optical metasurfaces enable advanced functionalities in imaging, sensing, and computing.
• Integrating multiple functions into a single metasurface device remains a significant challenge.
• Current designs often require large active areas, limiting miniaturization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel approach for integrating multiple photonic functions onto a single optical metasurface.
• To reduce the active area of metasurface devices by engineering structural disorder.
• To demonstrate the versatility of this approach through proof-of-concept devices.

Main Methods:

• Engineering structural disorder of meta-pixels to implement photonic functions.
• Repurposing unallocated space to encode independently addressable, functionally distinct meta-pixels.
• Designing and fabricating disordered mosaic metasurface platforms.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated reduced active area requirements without compromising optical performance.
• Successfully integrated multiple functionalities, including an achromatic metalens and polarimetric imaging.
• Achieved independent addressability of meta-pixels via optical degrees of freedom.

Conclusions:

• The disordered mosaic metasurface platform enables compact, high-density, multifunctional diffractive optical elements.
• This approach offers a versatile foundation for next-generation optical devices.
• Significant step towards realizing complex, integrated photonic systems.