Proceedings Article | 5 October 2015
Proc. SPIE. 9544, Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2015
KEYWORDS: Plasmonics, Diffraction, Visible radiation, Holograms, Resonators, Polarization, Wavefronts, Electromagnetic radiation, Optical resonators, Antennas
Metasurfaces offer new degrees of freedom in moulding the optical wavefronts by introducing abrupt and drastic changes in the amplitude, phase and/or polarization of electromagnetic radiation at the wavelength scale. By carefully arranging multiple subwavelength anisotropic or gradient optical resonators, metasurfaces have been shown to enable anomalous transmission, anomalous reflection, optical holograms and spin-orbit interaction. However, experimental realization of high-performance metasurfaces that can operate at visible frequency range has been a significant challenge due to high optical losses of plasmonic materials and difficulties in fabricating several subwavelength plasmonic resonators with high uniformity. Here, we propose a highly-efficient yet a simple metasurface design comprising of a single, anisotropic trapezoid-shape antenna in its unit cell. We demonstrate broadband (450 - 850 nm) anomalous reflection and spectrum splitting at visible and near-IR frequencies with 85% conversion efficiency. Average power ratio of anomalous reflection to the strongest diffraction mode was calculated to be on the order of 1000 and measured to be on the order of 10. The anomalous reflected photons have been visualized using a CCD camera, and broadband spectrum splitting performance has been confirmed experimentally using a free space, angle-resolved reflection measurement setup. Metasurface design proposed in this study is a clear departure from conventional metasurfaces utilizing multiple, anisotropic and/or gradient optical resonators, and could enable high-efficiency, broadband metasurfaces for achieving flat high SNR optical spectrometers, polarization beam splitters, directional emitters and spectrum splitting surfaces for photovoltaics.
