Dielectric materials that are low‐loss in the visible spectrum provide a promising platform to realize the pragmatic features of metasurfaces. Here, all‐dielectric, highly efficient, spin‐encoded transmission‐type metaholograms (in the visible domain) are demonstrated by utilizing hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a‐Si:H). In comparison to previously reported visible metaholograms based on TiO2 and other dielectric materials, all‐dielectric metasurfaces provide a cost‐effective more straightforwardly fabricated (aspect ratio 4.7), CMOS compatible, and comparably efficient solution in the visible domain. A unique way of utilizing polarization as an extra degree of freedom in the design to implement transmission‐type helicity‐encoded metaholograms is also proposed. The produced images exhibit high fidelity under both right and left circularly polarized illuminations. The proposed cost‐effective and CMOS‐compatible material and methods open up an avenue for on‐chip development of numerous new phenomena with high efficiency in the visible domain.
Metasurfaces, two dimensional (2D) metamaterials comprised of subwavelength features, can be used to tailor the amplitude, phase and polarisation of an incident electromagnetic wave propagating at an interface. Though many novel metasurfaces have been explored, the hunt for cost-effective, highly efficient, low-loss and polarisation insensitive applications is ongoing. In this work, we utilise an efficient and cost-effective dielectric material, hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H), to create a ultra-thin transmissive surface that simultaneously controls phase. This material exhibits significantly lower absorption in the visible regime compared to standard amorphous silicon, making it an ideal candidate for various on-chip applications. Our proposed design, which works on the principle of index waveguiding, integrates two distinct phase profiles, that of a lens and of a helical beam, and is versatile due to its polarisation-insensitivity. We show how this metasurface can lead to highly concentrated optical vortices in the visible domain, whose focused ring-shaped profiles carry orbital angular momentum at the miniaturised scale.
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