This technology is a compact, integrated metasurface which controls the flow and direction of light in four dimensions for optical devices.
Current technologies in optics generally separate integrated photonics and metasurfaces: photonics propagate waveguide modes, while metasurfaces shape the beam of light. Additionally, available technologies can only optically control a limited number of optical properties with few structural degrees of freedom. Therefore, current technologies are unable to control more than two disparate elements of light at the same time, including properties such as polarization, amplitude, and phase. This limits the type and specificity of these optical technologies by requiring large configurations, and lower quality displays.
This technology is an integrated metasurface which can generate a free-space optical wavefront with specific optical properties. This technology can work bidirectionally to either generate light then form a beam with a complex wavefront or couple a beam with a complex wavefront to an integrated chip. This technology is composed of three layers including a substrate, a low refractive index layer, and a high refractive index layer with paired units. This design enables the independent control of four optical parameters including amplitude, phase, polarization orientation and polarization ellipticity.
This technology has been validated in six devices including a radially polarized wavefront, a converging beam, a vortex beam and gaussian beam, a 2D and 4D Hologram and a Poincare beam.
IR CU22328
Licensing Contact: Greg Maskel
