Birefringent reflectarray metasurface for beam engineering in infrared

An infrared reflectarray metasurface with engineered birefringent behavior is demonstrated. The array reradiates incoming light into two orthogonal, linearly polarized reflections. The reflectarray is composed of rectangular metallic patch nanoantennas placed on top of a grounded dielectric stand-off layer. The patches are designed to locally manipulate the phase front of the incoming wave. They tailor the reflection phase to transform the phase front on the surface to the one desired for both orthogonal polarizations at the same time. The proposed nanoantenna metasurface can find applications in many optical devices, such as birefringent modulators, waveplates, polarizers, and splitters. (c) 2013 Optical Society of America