Dielectric Metasurfaces from Fundamentals to Applications

Citation

Kamali, Seyedeh Mahsa (2019) Dielectric Metasurfaces from Fundamentals to Applications. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/TPN1-XA53. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05112019-120905666

Abstract

In the past few decades, the advancements in nanotechnology have significantly altered many fields of science and technology, especially electronics and integrated photonics. Free-space optics, on the other hand, has remained mostly unaffected, and even today "optics" reminds us of carefully shaped and polished pieces of various types of glasses and crystals lumped into lenses and beam shapers. Several of these devices are then combined into more complicated optical systems like microscopes and pulse shapers that are expensive, bulky, sensitive to various environmental factors, and require several alignment steps. This thesis contains my work on designing and utilizing structures engineered at the nano-scale, which are called metasurfaces, to implement compact optical elements and systems with capabilities beyond those of conventional refractive and diffractive optics. My contributions to this field are two-fold: I have developed and contributed to the development of new concepts that take metasurfaces beyond conventional difractive optics in various aspects, in addition to paradigm changing platforms for optical element and system design. Here, I first give an overview and a brief history about optical metasurfaces. Next I discuss the unprecedented capabilities of metasurfaces in controlling light based on its degrees of freedom like illumination angle and polarization. Then, I will focus on various novel metasurface platforms of conformal and tunable metasurfaces, 3D metasurface beam shapers, and integrated metasurfaces. I conclude with an outlook on future potentials and challenges that need to be overcome for realizing their wide-spread applications.

Thesis Files