Ultraspectral Imaging Based on Metasurfaces with Freeform Shaped Meta-Atoms

Metasurfaces have an exceptional capacity to manipulate the phase, amplitude, polarization, or spectrum of light. However, unit cells, or meta-atoms, of metasurfaces are conventionally designed using regular shapes, limiting performance improvement. The utilization of metasurfaces with freeform shaped meta-atoms for on-chip ultraspectral imaging is proposed, where the freeform shaped patterns are generated with controllable feature sizes and boundary curvatures for feasible fabrication. These patterns broaden design diversity and enrich metasurface-unit spectral response with complicated Bloch modes, thus improving spectral imaging performance with enhanced spectrum recovery precision for broadband spectra and smaller center-wavelength deviation for narrowband spectra. A snapshot on-chip ultraspectral imaging, with 356 x 436 spectral pixels is experimentally demonstrated. Spectral resolution is state-of-the-art, at 0.5 nm, and mean fidelity of spectral reconstruction for a standard color board reaches 98.78%. These results support future applications in the field of precise intelligent perception. Moreover, the generating method for freeform shaped patterns also benefits for the forward and inverse designs for high-performance metasurfaces.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a method of using metasurfaces with freeform shaped meta-atoms for on-chip ultraspectral imaging, and demonstrates its performance through experiments. The design of freeform shaped patterns expands the design diversity of metasurfaces and improves the spectral imaging performance significantly.