Single-Layered Reflective Metasurface Achieving Simultaneous Spin-Selective Perfect Absorption and Efficient Wavefront Manipulation

As the 2D counterpart of metamaterials, metasurfaces have drawn wide attentions in recent years due to their unique electromagnetic (EM) properties and subwavelength footprints. Although great efforts have been made in metasurface-based full vectorial manipulation of EM waves, the realization of multifunctional devices with high compactness is still challenging. Here, by employing the mutual coupling between the meta-atoms to induce spin-selective magnetic resonance, a generalized design principle based on single-layered metasurface is proposed that can achieve giant chiral absorption with average circular dichroism larger than 80%. In addition, arbitrary wavefront manipulation for reflected waves can also be realized with operation efficiency larger than 88%. As a proof of concept, three kinds of chiral devices including beam deflector, vortex beam generator, and meta-hologram are numerically investigated in infrared region with high performance. It is believed that these multifunctional devices with simple geometry have great potentials in the field of chiral imaging, chiroptical spectroscopy, and EM communication.

Automated summary

This study presents a design principle based on a single-layer metasurface that can achieve giant chiral absorption and arbitrary wavefront manipulation for reflected waves with an operation efficiency greater than 88%. Numerical investigations show that in the infrared region, multifunctional chiral devices such as beam deflectors, vortex beam generators, and meta-holograms exhibit high performance.