Polarization-independent achromatic Huygens' metalens with large numerical aperture and broad bandwidth

Achromatic lenses, which have the same focal length regardless of the illumination frequency, find strong applications in imaging, sensing, and communication systems. Making achromatic lenses with metasurfaces is highly desirable because they are flat, ultrathin, relatively light, and easily fabricable. However, existing metalenses experience combinations of limitations which include single polarization operation, narrow bandwidth, and small numerical aperture (NA). In this work, we propose a dual polarized, broadband and high NA achromatic metalens based on the Huygens' metasurface. We use Huygens' metasurface unit cells with three tunable resonances to realize a stable group delay over a large bandwidth, while also achieving high transparency and large phase tunability. With these cells, we construct a dual-polarized achromatic Huygens' metalens with an NA of 0.64 that works from 22 to 26 GHz. Our achromatic metalens achieves diffraction-limited focusing with 2 % maximum focal length deviation and 70 % average focusing efficiency over a bandwidth of 16.7 %. Most key performance metrics for this lens surpass or are comparable with the best of previous metalenses. An achromatic metalens simultaneously achieving broad bandwidth, large NA, and polarization-independent operation will open wide-ranging opportunities for microwave and mm-wave imaging and communication applications.

Automated summary

In this work, a dual-polarized, broadband and high NA achromatic metalens based on the Huygens' metasurface is proposed. The metalens achieves diffraction-limited focusing with 2% maximum focal length deviation and 70% average focusing efficiency over a bandwidth of 16.7%. It opens wide-ranging opportunities for microwave and mm-wave imaging and communication applications.