Phenomenological modeling of geometric metasurfaces

Metasurfaces, with their superior capability in manipulating the optical wavefront at the subwavelength scale and low manufacturing complexity, have shown great potential for planar photonics and novel optical devices. However, vector field simulation of metasurfaces is so far limited to periodic-structured metasurfaces containing a small number of meta-atoms in the unit cell by using full-wave numerical methods. Here, focusing on achiral meta-atoms only with electric polarizability and thickness far less than the wavelength of light, and ignoring the coupling between meta-atoms, we propose a general phenomenological method to analytically model the metasurfaces based on the assumption that the meta-atoms possess localized resonances with Lorentz-Drude forms, whose exact form can be retrieved from the full wave simulation of a single element. Applied to phase modulated geometric metasurfaces constituted by identical meta-atoms with different orientations, our analytical results show good agreement with full-wave numerical simulations. The proposed theory provides an efficient method to model and design optical devices based on metasurfaces. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America