Controlling Vector Bessel Beams with Metasurfaces

Unprecedented control of an electromagnetic wave front is demonstrated with reflectionless meta-surfaces that can manipulate vector Bessel beams: cylindrical vector beams with a Bessel profile. First, two metasurfaces are developed to convert linearly and circularly polarized Gaussian beams into vector Bessel beams. Each unit cell of the metasurfaces provides polarization and phase control with high efficiency. Next, the reciprocal process is demonstrated: an incident radially polarized Bessel beam is transformed into collimated, linearly and circularly polarized beams. In this configuration, a planar Bessel beam launcher is integrated with a collimating metasurface lens to realize a low-profile lens-antenna. The lens-antenna achieves a high directivity (exceeding 20 dB) with a subwavelength overall thickness. Finally, a metasurface providing isotropic polarization rotation is used to transform a radially polarized Bessel beam into an azimuthally polarized Bessel beam. This work demonstrates that metasurfaces can be used to generate arbitrary combinations of radial and azimuthal polarizations for applications such as focus shaping or generating tractor beams.