Overcoming chromatic aberrations is a vital concern in imaging systems in order to facilitate fullcolor and hyperspectral imaging. By contrast, large dispersion holds opportunities for spectroscopy and tomography. Combining both functions into a single component will significantly enhance its versatility. A strategy is proposed to delicately integrate two lenses with a static resonant phase and a switchable geometric phase separately. The former is a metasurface lens with a linear phase dispersion. The latter is composed of liquid crystals (LCs) with space-variant orientations with a phase profile that is frequency independent. By this means, a broadband achromatic focusing from 0.9 to 1.4 THz is revealed. When a saturated bias is applied on LCs, the geometric phase modulation vanishes, leaving only the resonant phase of the metalens. Correspondingly, the device changes from achromatic to dispersive. Furthermore, a metadeflector with tunable dispersion is demonstrated to verify the universality of the proposed method. Our work may pave a way toward active metaoptics, promoting various imaging applications.
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.
Terahertz (THz) metadevices featured by high-Q Fano resonance are applicable for ultrasensitive biodetection. The active tuning of Fano resonance further extends their applications to switching and filtering. Here, we propose a dynamic Fano cloaking in a liquid crystal (LC) integrated THz metasurface. The metasurface is composed of two-gap asymmetric split rings. Its Fano resonance is intensively dependent on the incident polarization. The Fano resonance occurs when illuminated by THz waves with polarization perpendicular to the gaps, while for parallel polarization, the Fano resonance vanishes, namely, the cloaking of Fano resonators. A 250-lm-thick LC layer functions as an integrated tunable polarization converter. Thus, the device can be electrically switched between the sharp Fano state and the high-transmission state. The modulation depth reaches over 50% in a broad frequency range of 660 GHz. This work may inspire various advanced active THz apparatuses for biosensing, switching, and filtering.
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