Metasurfaces have recently emerged as a promising technology to realize flat and ultra-thin optical elements that can manipulate light at sub-wavelength scale. The typical design flow of a metasurface involves tedious Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulations followed by creation of a GDSII layout of the metasurface phase profile, the latter being essential for fabrication purposes. Both these steps can be time-consuming and involve the usage of expensive software. To make the design process more straightforward, we have developed an open-source software called MetaOptics built using Python for designing a generic metasurface optical element. MetaOptics uses the FDTD simulated phase response data of a set of meta-atoms and converts the phase profile of any given optical element into a metasurface GDSII layout. MetaOptics comes with in-built FDTD data for most commonly used wavelengths in the visible and infrared spectrum. It also has an option to upload user-specific dimension versus transmission phase data for any choice of wavelength. In this work we describe the software's framework and provide details to guide users to design a metasurface layout using MetaOptics.

中文翻译：

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MetaOptics：用于设计超表面光学元件GDSII布局的开源软件。

近来，超颖表面已成为一种有前景的技术，可实现可在亚波长范围内操纵光的平面和超薄光学元件。超颖表面的典型设计流程包括繁琐的有限时域（FDTD）模拟，然后创建超颖表面相轮廓的GDSII布局，后者对于制造目的是必不可少的。这两个步骤都可能很耗时并且涉及昂贵软件的使用。为了使设计过程更加简单明了，我们开发了一个名为MetaOptics的开源软件，该软件使用Python构建，用于设计通用的超表面光学元件。MetaOptics使用一组偏原子的FDTD模拟相位响应数据，并将任何给定光学元件的相位轮廓转换为超表面GDSII布局。MetaOptics带有内置的FDTD数据，用于可见光谱和红外光谱中最常用的波长。对于任何波长选择，它还可以选择上传特定于用户的尺寸与传输相位数据。在这项工作中，我们描述了软件的框架，并提供了详细信息来指导用户使用MetaOptics设计超曲面布局。