Highly anisotropic metasurface : a polarized beam splitter and hologram

Zheng, Jun and Ye, Zhi-Cheng and Sun, Nan-Ling and Zhang, Rui and Sheng, Zheng-Ming and Shieh, Han-Ping and Zhang, Jie (2014) Highly anisotropic metasurface : a polarized beam splitter and hologram. Scientific Reports, 4. 649. ISSN 2045-2322 (https://doi.org/10.1038/srep06491)

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Abstract

Two-dimensional metasurface structures have recently been proposed to reduce the challenges of fabrication of traditional plasmonic metamaterials. However, complex designs and sophisticated fabrication procedures are still required. Here, we present a unique one-dimensional (1-D) metasurface based on bilayered metallic nanowire gratings, which behaves as an ideal polarized beam splitter, producing strong negative reflection for transverse-magnetic (TM) light and efficient reflection for transverse-electric (TE) light. The large anisotropy resulting from this TE-metal-like/TM-dielectric-like feature can be explained by the dispersion curve based on the Bloch theory of periodic metal-insulator-metal waveguides. The results indicate that this photon manipulation mechanism is fundamentally different from those previously proposed for 2-D or 3-D metastructures. Based on this new material platform, a novel form of metasurface holography is proposed and demonstrated, in which an image can only be reconstructed by using a TM light beam. By reducing the metamaterial structures to 1-D, our metasurface beam splitter exhibits the qualities of cost-efficient fabrication, robust performance, and high tunability, in addition to its applicability over a wide range of working wavelengths and incident angles. This development paves a foundation for metasurface structure designs towards practical metamaterial applications.