High Numerical Aperture Achromatic Meta-Devices through Dispersion Compensation

Abstract: Dispersion engineering is a long-standing challenge in optical systems, and it is particularly important for metasurfaces, which naturally suffer from strong chromatic aberrations due to their ultralow profile. Stacks of metasurfaces have recently implemented dispersion control to address these challenges. However, these approaches still suffer from bottlenecks in terms of the available material refractive index and required aspect ratios, resulting in limited phase and group delay coverage, constraining their numerical aperture (NA), size and operating bandwidth. To address these challenges, we explore a dispersion compensation strategy combined with full-wave simulation-free inverse design to implement ultra-high NA, broadband dispersion control in metasurfaces, not requiring large refractive index materials and high aspect ratio processing technology. We experimentally demonstrate multiple meta-devices with highly customized dispersion engineering in the microwave regime, including broadband achromatic diffraction-limited meta-devices with NA=0.98 and 60% fractional bandwidth. Our proposed platform explores a paradigm for dispersion control with metasurfaces, which may facilitate advanced and scalable dispersion functionalities.