Wide-angle and high-efficiency flat retroreflector.

We propose a flat retroreflector that can efficiently reflect the electromagnetic waves back along its incident direction in a wide continuous range of angles. This retroreflector consists of a quadratic metalens and a flat metallic reflector at the focal plane of the former. The quadratic metalens is a dielectric pillar array encoded with a quadratic phase profile and it is embedded in the top side of the substrate. The flat reflector is on the bottom side of the substrate. The designed retroreflector has a diameter of 40 mm, a thickness of 15 mm, and a working frequency of 77 GHz. Through meta-units optimization, a retroreflection efficiency of 38.51% at ± 60° incidence and an average retroreflection efficiency of 46.39% for the incident angles from 0° to 60° can be numerically demonstrated. This flat retroreflector is easy for integration, which is promising for potential applications in the miniature wireless communication systems.

High-efficiency one-dimensional metalens for 3D focusing.

We demonstrate a high-efficiency on-chip one-dimensional metalens for three-dimensional (3D) light focusing. The metalens consists of a one-dimensional dielectric nano-antenna array, which scatters the evanescent wave of a nano-waveguide into free space and focuses this scattered light into a 3D ring. The corresponding phase profile of the metalens is controlled by the relative locations of antennas in the array. Through antenna-waveguide distance optimization, the designed metalens only scatters 1.5% of propagation light into free space and 55% of the scattered energy is focused into the 3D ring. When we use the antennas with an optimized shape, 50.18% of the focused energy is concentrated in a circular arc of the ring, which subtends an angle of 48°. This high-efficiency on-chip one-dimensional metalens is promising for non-invasive optical signal detection in photonic integrated chips.