Broadband spin-unlocked metasurfaces for bifunctional wavefront manipulations
Shaohua Dong, Shiqing Li, Xiaohui Ling, Guangwei Hu, Yi Li, Hongyi Zhu, Lei Zhou, Shulin Sun
Abstract
Recently, Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) metasurfaces have exhibited powerful capabilities to control spin-polarized light. However, the adopted abrupt PB phase, introduced by simply rotating the basic elements, is spin-locked with opposite signs for different spin excitations, greatly limiting their practical applications. Here, we introduce a high-efficiency and broadband spin-unlocked metasurface with two mechanisms of a resonance phase and a geometric phase perfectly combined together. The design strategy is quite simple just through changing one geometric parameter rather than multi parameter optimization. As a proof of concept, the anomalous photonic spin Hall effect based on the spin-unlocked metasurface is demonstrated first, showing high experimental efficiency (over 80%) in a broad frequency range (11.3–16.6 GHz). Furthermore, another spin-unlocked metasurface is built to demonstrate the completely independent wavefront manipulations, i.e., the focusing effect and anomalous reflection. These findings significantly expand the electromagnetic control ability of a metasurface.