December 2017, a cover paper in Advanced Functional Materials, and first reported the realization of simultaneous chiral response and arbitrary wavefront modulation with monolayer all-dielectric metasurfaces. The authors are the researchers from State Key Laboratory of Optical Technologies on Nano-Fabrication and Micro-Engineering of IOE,CAS. This work may provide a promising route to replace bulky cascading optical components with only one ultrathin metasurface and new ideas for studying chiral and functional materials.  

The molecular structure of most bio-essential nutrients is inherently chiral, such as amino acids and glucose. The concentration of these molecules can be detected by the chiral optical response of the structure. However, the conventional chiral detection techniques not only make the whole system bulky, thus far away from miniaturization and integration, but also reduce the efficiency and imaging quality. The researchers form IOE first reported a net all-dielectric metasurface based on asymmetric photonic spin–orbit interactions. The metasurface was fabricated simply with strong chiral response, which can provides simultaneously control the rotation of the circularly polarized transmission light and wavefront modulation. These characteristics can efficiently reduce the volume, weight, and cost of the optical systems for chiral imaging, chiroptical spectroscopy, optical communication, and so forth many applications. For instance, in a chiral imaging system, our proposed metasurface could replace sophisticated setups requiring combination of polarizers, waveplates, and lenses to realize chiral detection.  

The research results were published in Advanced Functional Materials (Adv Funct Mater 2017, 271770280) and was selected as the cover article. The research project has been supported by the national 973 Plan and the National Natural Science Foundation. 

The artical links: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201770280/full 

The Cover Page. 

The measured experimental results. 

Contact

CAO Qiang

Institute of Optics and Electronics

Email: caoqiang@ioe.ac.cn