A Fully Phase‐Modulated Metasurface as An Energy‐Controllable Circular Polarization Router

• Main Authors: Yueyi Yuan, Shang Sun, Yang Chen, Kuang Zhang, Xumin Ding, Badreddine Ratni, Qun Wu, Shah Nawaz Burokur, Cheng‐Wei Qiu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2020-09-01
• Series: Advanced Science
• Subjects: circular polarization; energy‐control; metasurfaces; phase modulation; routers
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202001437

Abstract Geometric metasurfaces primarily follow the physical mechanism of Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) phases, empowering wavefront control of cross‐polarized reflective/transmissive light components. However, inherently accompanying the cross‐polarized components, the copolarized output components have not been attempted in parallel in existing works. Here, a general method is proposed to construct phase‐modulated metasurfaces for implementing functionalities separately in co‐ and cross‐polarized output fields under circularly polarized (CP) incidence, which is impossible to achieve with solely a geometric phase. By introducing a propagation phase as an additional degree of freedom, the electromagnetic (EM) energy carried by co‐ and cross‐polarized transmitted fields can be fully phase‐modulated with independent wavefronts. Under one CP incidence, a metasurface for separate functionalities with controllable energy repartition is verified by simulations and proof‐of‐principle microwave experiments. A variety of applications can be readily expected in spin‐selective optics, spin‐Hall metasurfaces, and multitasked metasurfaces operating in both reflective and transmissive modes.