Electrically Tunable Reflective Metasurfaces with Continuous and Full-Phase Modulation for High-Efficiency Wavefront Control at Visible Frequencies

• Published in: ACS nano Vol. 17; no. 17; pp. 16952 - 16959
• Main Authors: Moitra, Parikshit, Xu, Xuewu, Maruthiyodan Veetil, Rasna, Liang, Xinan, Mass, Tobias W. W., Kuznetsov, Arseniy I., Paniagua-Domínguez, Ramón
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society 12-09-2023
• Subjects: Tunable metasurfaces; small pixels; electrical tunability; dynamic beam steering; wavefront control; liquid crystal; spatial light modulators
• ISSN: 1936-0851; 1936-086X
• DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.3c04071

All-dielectric optical metasurfaces can locally control the amplitude and phase of light at the nanoscale, enabling arbitrary wavefront shaping. However, lack of postfabrication tunability has limited the true potential of metasurfaces for many applications. Here, we utilize a thin liquid crystal (LC) layer as a tunable medium surrounding the metasurface to achieve a phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM) with high reflection in the visible frequency, exhibiting active and continuous resonance tuning with associated 2π phase control and uncoupled amplitude. Dynamic wavefront shaping is demonstrated by programming 96 individually addressable electrodes with a small pixel pitch of ∼1 μm. The small pixel size is facilitated by the reduced LC thickness, strongly suppressing cross-talk among pixels. This device is used to demonstrate dynamic beam steering with a wide field-of-view and high absolute diffraction efficiencies. We believe that our demonstration may help realize next-generation, high-resolution SLMs, with wide applications in dynamic holography, tunable optics, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR), to mention a few.