Achieving Photonic Spin Hall Effect, Spin-Selective Absorption, and Beam Deflection with a Vanadium Dioxide Metasurface

Metasurface-based research with phase-change materials has been a prominent and rapidly developing research field that has drawn considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we proposed a kind of tunable metasurface based on the simplest metal-insulator-metal structure, which can be realized by the mutual transformation of insulating and metallic states of vanadium dioxide (VO2) and can realize the functional switching of photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE), absorption and beam deflection at the same terahertz frequency. When VO2 is insulating, combined with the geometric phase, the metasurface can realize PSHE. A normal incident linear polarized wave will be split into two spin-polarized reflection beams traveling in two off-normal directions. When VO2 is in the metal state, the designed metasurface can be used as a wave absorber and a deflector, which will completely absorb LCP waves, while the reflected amplitude of RCP waves is 0.828 and deflects. Our design only consists of one layer of artificial structure with two materials and is easy to realize in the experiment compared with the metasurface of a multi-layer structure, which can provide new ideas for the research of tunable multifunctional metasurface.

Automated summary

In this paper, a tunable metasurface based on a simple metal-insulator-metal structure is proposed, which can be realized by the mutual transformation of insulating and metallic states of vanadium dioxide (VO2). The metasurface can achieve functional switching of photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE), absorption and beam deflection. Our design only consists of one layer of artificial structure with two materials and is easy to realize in the experiment, providing new ideas for the research of tunable multifunctional metasurface.