Polarization switching and depolarization with a double-sided metasurface at 193 nm

In 193-nm immersion lithography systems, polarization control devices capable of generating cylindrical vector beams and realizing depolarization play a crucial role. To enable compact polarization manipulation at 193 nm, we propose and numerically validate polarization control devices based on double-sided all-dielectric metasurfaces. The double-sided configuration is introduced to mitigate the high-aspect-ratio requirements imposed by low-refractive-index materials. Simulation results demonstrate that, at the wavelength of 193 nm, the proposed device can dynamically switch among radial polarization, azimuthal polarization, and generalized cylindrical vector beams by simply rotating the polarization angle of an incident linearly polarized beam, while maintaining an efficiency of approximately 65% over different input polarization angles. In addition, within the same design framework, the metasurfaces can also convert a linearly polarized input into a spatially averaged depolarized output, yielding a degree of polarization below 20%. This work provides an integrable solution for polarization manipulation in the deep-ultraviolet (DUV) regime.