High Contrast Metastructures XIV

A completely new class of planar optics has emerged using subwavelength metastructures and metasurfaces with a large contrast in dielectric constants. “High-contrast metastructure” refers to this type of optical material which is formed by a planar array of coupled-resonance structures, which are defined by high refractive index contrast boundaries that have dimensions comparable to the wavelength of interest. By manipulating the resonance of each individual structures with the collective periodic resonance, this metastructure allows very strong light-matter interaction within the thin planar material which provides a new platform to efficiently manipulate photons. Both 1D and 2D, uniform and chirped high-contrast gratings (HCGs), metastructures and metasurfaces are demonstrated to create mirrors, lenses, filters, polarizations, birefrigent elements, 3D display and many traditional bulk optical components. This has enabled simple fabrication of long-wavelength vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), dynamically tunable all-pass filters (APF) for fast optical beam steering, high-Q resonators with surface-normal and arbitrary angle output, enabling massive wafer-scale semiconductor lasers and optical filters. They are used to form hollow core waveguide for chip-scale ultra-low loss photonic delays. Vertical to in-plane waveguide coupler can be made with high efficiency for easy integration with Si-photonic circuits. Chirped HCGs are shown as excellent focusing reflectors and lenses with very high numerical apertures. Recently, active metasurface research has been pursued. Finally, simple but rigorous theoretical studies lead to intuitive device designs. The field has seen rapid advances in exciting experimental demonstrations and theoretical results as well as commercial flat-optics applications. Most recently, applications extended to near-to-eye displays in a variety of waveguide combiner architectures for Augmented Reality (AR) and Optical See-Through (OST) Mixed Reality (MR) Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). This conference aims to provide an international forum for presenting the latest results and reviewing technologies relevant to new physics and devices using high contrast subwavelength metastructures. Prospective authors are invited to submit original experimental and theoretical papers dealing with enabling technology for optoelectronic device integration either on Si, or III-V-based platforms.

Topics of particular interests include incorporation of high-contrast metastructures in the following:

• metalens and diffractive optical elements for AR/VR HMD and 3D sensing
• 3D display and hologram: design, fabrication and applications
• metasurface optical phase masks for phase and polarization control
• topological lasers and high-Q resonators
• VCSELs, tunable VCSELs and membrane lasers
• broadband mirrors, lenses, and focusing mirrors
• optomechanics: physics and devices
• filters, tunable filters, WDM multiplexer and de-multiplexers
• all-dielectric dissipation-less metamaterials
• zero-index metamaterials and anisotropic metamaterials
• bound states in the continuum
• photonic topological insulator
• response to both the electric and magnetic fields of light
• support of large optical chirality and anisotropy
• dispersion engineering
• spectral tailoring and management for solar photovoltaic and solar thermal applications
• slow light, fast light, and stop light devices
• optical switches and modulators
• metastructure waveguides
• nonlinear optics; coherent optical mixers
• optical amplifiers
• omni mirrors and spatial-mode filtering
• subwavelength plasmonics
• manipulation of polarization
• beam-steering devices
• novel fabrication techniques and materials
• Inverse design simulation modeling for metastructures/metasurfaces
• photonic crystal devices, guided mode and leaky mode resonances.