Terahertz cascaded metasurfaces for both spin-symmetric and asymmetric beam diffractions with active power distribution

Ultra-compact and tunable devices for terahertz (THz) beam manipulation are highly desired in wireless communication and radar scanning. Although the appearance of the Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) metasurface has provided strategies for THz beam scanning, active output power distribution is still difficult to achieve, and the flexibility of beam manipulation is limited by a single metasurface. In this work, we demonstrated an all-dielectric cascaded metasurface consisting of a spin-decoupled metasurface and a PB metasurface. The conjugated characteristic of the PB phase for two photonic spin states is broken with highly efficient high-order diffractions of wave vector superposition through the cascaded metasurfaces, and both spin-symmetric and spin-asymmetric transmissions are obtained by designing the differences in metasurface bandwidth. Moreover, the output power between the deflection beams can be actively tuned by changing the incident polarization state, achieving power modulation ratios of 99.3% and 95.1% for the two conjugated spin beams, respectively. Therefore, this work realizes controllable wave division multiplexing and power distribution and opens new avenues for the design of ultra-compact multifunctional devices. (C) 2023 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license

Automated summary

In this work, we demonstrated an all-dielectric cascaded metasurface consisting of a spin-decoupled metasurface and a PB metasurface. The design achieves manipulation of terahertz (THz) beams, including the disruption of diffraction characteristics of the complementary spin beams and power modulation. This work opens up new avenues for the design of ultra-compact multifunctional devices.