Airy optical beams have emerged to hold enormous theoretical and experimental research interest due to their outstanding characteristics. Conventional approaches suffer from bulky and costly systems, as well as poor phase discretization. The newly developed metasurface-based Airy beam generators have constraints of polarization dependence or limited generation efficiency. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a polarization-independent silicon dielectric metasurface for generation of high-efficiency Airy optical beams. In our implementation, rather than synchronous manipulation of the amplitude and phase by plasmonic or Huygens’ metasurfaces, we employ and impose a 3/2 phase-only manipulation to the dielectric metasurface, consisting of an array of silicon nanopillars with an optimized transmission efficiency as high as 97%. The resultant Airy optical beams possess extraordinarily large deflection angles and relatively narrow beam widths. Our validated scheme will open up a fascinating doorway to broaden the application scenarios of Airy optical beams on ultracompact photonic platforms.

中文翻译：

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具有介电超表面的与偏振无关的高效艾里光束生成

艾里光束由于其突出的特性而引起了巨大的理论和实验研究兴趣。传统方法存在庞大且昂贵的系统以及较差的相位离散化。新开发的基于超表面的艾里光束发生器具有偏振依赖性或有限的生成效率的限制。在这里，我们通过实验证明了一种与偏振无关的硅电介质超表面，用于产生高效的艾里光束。在我们的实现中，我们不是通过等离子体或惠更斯的超表面对振幅和相位进行同步操作，而是对介电超表面采用并强加 3/2 相位操作，由一系列具有优化传输效率的硅纳米柱组成，如高达 97%。由此产生的艾里光束具有非常大的偏转角和相对较窄的光束宽度。我们经过验证的方案将为拓宽艾里光束在超紧凑光子平台上的应用场景打开一扇迷人的大门。