Abstract Airy beams exhibit intriguing properties such as nonspreading, self-bending, and self-healing and have attracted considerable recent interest because of their many potential applications in photonics, such as to beam focusing, light-sheet microscopy, and biomedical imaging. However, previous approaches to generate Airy beams using photonic structures have suffered from severe chromatic problems arising from strong frequency dispersion of the scatterers. Here, we design and fabricate a metasurface composed of silicon posts for the frequency range 0.4–0.8 THz in transmission mode, and we experimentally demonstrate achromatic Airy beams exhibiting autofocusing properties. We further show numerically that a generated achromatic Airy-beam-based metalens exhibits self-healing properties that are immune to scattering by particles and that it also possesses a larger depth of focus than a traditional metalens. Our results pave the way to the realization of flat photonic devices for applications to noninvasive biomedical imaging and light-sheet microscopy, and we provide a numerical demonstration of a device protocol.

中文翻译：

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使用介电超表面产生消色差太赫兹艾里光束

摘要 艾里光束表现出耐人寻味的特性，如不扩散、自弯曲和自修复，并且由于它们在光子学中的许多潜在应用，如光束聚焦、光片显微镜和生物医学成像，最近引起了相当大的兴趣。然而，以前使用光子结构生成艾里光束的方法存在由散射体的强频率色散引起的严重色度问题。在这里，我们设计并制造了一个由硅柱组成的超表面，频率范围为 0.4-0.8 THz 的传输模式，并通过实验证明了具有自动聚焦特性的消色差艾里光束。我们进一步在数值上表明，生成的基于消色差艾里光束的元透镜具有自愈特性，不受粒子散射的影响，并且与传统的元透镜相比，它还具有更大的焦深。我们的结果为实现用于无创生物医学成像和光片显微镜的平面光子器件铺平了道路，并且我们提供了器件协议的数值演示。