Generating controllable optical trap arrays with a polarization-based metalense

Abstract

Metalenses have been widely used in various optical systems due to their compact size, lightweight nature and high efficiency. This paper presents a novel metalense for generating multiple optical trap arrays. The proposed metalense is composed of many unit cells of half-wave plate. By changing the polarization state of the incident light, the optical trap array generated by the metalense can be controlled. To evaluate its performance, we simulate the metalense with total trap numbers of 4 and 6 respectively. The results show that the produced optical trap arrays exhibit precise positioning, uniform size, and intensity distribution. Furthermore, the arrays maintain excellent uniformity and shape integrity even when the number of optical traps is increased. Compared with the previous metalenses only produce a specific optical trap array, the designed metalense offers higher flexibility and better meets the experimental requirements of multi-trap optical tweezers. Our metalense exhibits significant potential for the integration and miniaturization of optical trap arrays, as well as other focusing optical systems.