Broadband reflective metasurface for focusing underwater ultrasonic waves with linearly tunable focal length

We combine theory and experiment to demonstrate that a carefully designed gradient meta-surface supports high-efficiency anomalous reflections for near-infrared light following the generalized Snell's law, and the reflected wave becomes a bounded surface wave as the incident angle exceeds a critical value. Compared to previously fabricated gradient meta-surfaces in infrared regime, our samples work in a shorter wavelength regime with a broad bandwidth (750-900 nm), exhibit a much higher conversion efficiency (∼80%) to the anomalous reflection mode at normal incidence, and keep light polarization unchanged after the anomalous reflection. Finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) simulations are in excellent agreement with experiments. Our findings may lead to many interesting applications, such as antireflection coating, polarization and spectral beam splitters, high-efficiency light absorbers, and surface plasmon couplers.

An impedance-matched surface has the property that an incident wave generates no reflection. Here we demonstrate that by using a simple construction, an acoustically reflecting surface can acquire hybrid resonances and becomes impedance-matched to airborne sound at tunable frequencies, such that no reflection is generated. Each resonant cell of the metasurface is deep-subwavelength in all its spatial dimensions, with its thickness less than the peak absorption wavelength by two orders of magnitude. As there can be no transmission, the impedance-matched acoustic wave is hence either completely absorbed at one or multiple frequencies, or converted into other form(s) of energy, such as an electrical current. A high acoustic-electrical energy conversion efficiency of 23% is achieved.

The concept of optical phase discontinuities is applied to the design and demonstration of aberration-free planar lenses and axicons, comprising a phased array of ultrathin subwavelength spaced optical antennas. The lenses and axicons consist of radial distributions of V-shaped nanoantennas that generate respectively spherical wavefronts and non-diffracting Bessel beams at telecom wavelengths. Simulations are also presented to show that our aberration-free designs are applicable to high numerical aperture lenses such as flat microscope objectives.