Abstract-Achromatic terahertz Airy beam generation with dielectric metasurfaces

 

Qingqing Cheng , Juncheng Wang, Ling Ma, Zhixiong Shen, Jing Zhang, Xiaoying Zheng ,Tao Chen, Ye Yu, Dong Yu, Qiong He, Wei Hu, Tao Li, Songlin Zhuang,  Lei Zhou

https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/nanoph/ahead-of-print/article-10.1515-nanoph-2020-0536/article-10.1515-nanoph-2020-0536.xml?rskey=WV2s5h&result=7&tab_body=abstract

Airy beams exhibit intriguing properties such as nonspreading, self-bending, and self-healing and have attracted considerable recent interest because of their many potential applications in photonics, such as to beam focusing, light-sheet microscopy, and biomedical imaging. However, previous approaches to generate Airy beams using photonic structures have suffered from severe chromatic problems arising from strong frequency dispersion of the scatterers. Here, we design and fabricate a metasurface composed of silicon posts for the frequency range 0.4–0.8 THz in transmission mode, and we experimentally demonstrate achromatic Airy beams exhibiting autofocusing properties. We further show numerically that a generated achromatic Airy-beam-based metalens exhibits self-healing properties that are immune to scattering by particles and that it also possesses a larger depth of focus than a traditional metalens. Our results pave the way to the realization of flat photonic devices for applications to noninvasive biomedical imaging and light-sheet microscopy, and we provide a numerical demonstration of a device protocol.

Abstract-Broadband achromatic metalens in terahertz regime

Qingqing Cheng, Meilin Ma, Dong Yu, Zhixiong Shen, Jingya Xie, Juncheng Wang, Nianxi Xu, Hanming Guo, Wei Hu, Shuming Wang, Tao Li, Songlin Zhuang



https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095927319304621

Achromatic focusing is essential for broadband operation, which has recently been realized from visible to infrared wavelengths using a metasurface. Similarly, multi-terahertz functional devices can be encoded in a desired metasurface phase profile. However, metalenses suffer from larger chromatic aberrations because of the intrinsic dispersion of each unit element. Here, we propose an achromatic metalens with C-shaped unit elements working from 0.3 to 0.8 THz with a bandwidth of approximately 91% over the centre frequency. The designed metalens possesses a high working efficiency of more than 68% at the peak and a relatively high numerical aperture of 0.385. We further demonstrate the robustness of our C-shaped metalens, considering lateral shape deformations and deviations in the etching depth. Our metalens design opens an avenue for future applications of terahertz meta-devices in spectroscopy, time-of-flight tomography and hyperspectral imaging systems.

Abstract-Liquid crystal tunable terahertz lens with spin-selected focusing property

Zhixiong Shen, Shenghang Zhou, Shijun Ge, Wei Duan, Lingling Ma, Yanqing Lu, and Wei Hu

Fig. 1 (a) The schematic illustration of the spin-selected lens. (b) The photo of the sample under crossed polarizers (indicated by two yellow arrows). Scale bar: 1 mm. (c) The designed phase diagram. Inset shows a magnified 6 × 6 pixel array, which is divided into lattice I and II. The lattice periodicity p is 152 μm. (d) The focusing functions of lattice I and II.

We propose and demonstrate an active spin-selected lens with liquid crystal (LC) in the terahertz (THz) range. The lens is a superposition of two geometric phase lenses with separate centers and conjugated phase profiles. Its digitalized multidirectional LC orientations are realized via a dynamic micro-lithography-based photo-patterning technique and sandwiched by two graphene-electrode-covered silica substrates. The specific lens can separate the focusing spots of incident light with opposite circular polarizations. Its focusing performance from 0.8 to 1.2 THz is characterized using a scanning near-field THz microscope system. The polarization conversion efficiency varies from 32.1% to 70.2% in this band. The spin-selected focusing functions match well with numerical simulations. Such lens exhibits the merit of dynamic functions, low insertion loss and broadband applicability. It may inspire various practical THz apparatuses.

© 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Abstract-Terahertz vortex beam generator based on a photopatterned large birefringence liquid crystal

Shijun Ge, Peng Chen, Zhixiong Shen, Wenfeng Sun, Xinke Wang, Wei Hu, Yan Zhang, and Yanqing Lu

https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-25-11-12349

A terahertz (THz) q-plate is proposed and demonstrated to generate THz vortex beams. It is composed of a large birefringence liquid crystal (LC) with spatially-varying director distribution sandwiched by two pieces of fused silica glass. A polarization-sensitive alignment agent is photopatterned to carry out the specific LC director distribution. THz vortex beams with different topological charges are characterized with a THz digital holographic imaging system. The intensity and phase distributions consistent with theoretical analyses are obtained. Besides, an eight-lobed intensity distribution is observed corresponding to the vertical polarization component of a cylindrical vector beam. This work may inspire novel THz applications.

© 2017 Optical Society of America